Milton Bradley Company

Milton Bradley invented the American board game industry. His 1860 'Checkered Game of Life' was the first widely sold board game in America. Bradley's company pioneered color lithography for games and introduced iconic titles across more than a century. Hasbro acquired Milton Bradley in 1984.

Milton Bradley, a Springfield lithographer whose printing business was ruined when Abraham Lincoln grew a beard and made his best-selling portrait print unsaleable — he turned to games instead.

The founding story is true and is the best explanation of the company's character: Bradley was a printer who understood that a game is a printed product. His first, The Checkered Game of Life in 1860, was a moral-instruction board game in which the player advanced through virtues and vices toward Happy Old Age, and it sold in the tens of thousands.

Milton Bradley became one of the two great American game publishers, and its catalogue is a list of games most Americans have played: Candy Land, devised by a polio patient teaching herself and written for children who could not yet read; Chutes and Ladders; the 1960 Game of Life, reworked as a suburban career board; Twister, which was denounced as risqué and became a sensation after being played on television; Battleship, Connect Four, Boggle, Stratego.

Bradley was also a serious advocate of kindergarten education, publishing teaching materials and paper goods for early-childhood classrooms — an aspect of the company usually forgotten behind the games. Hasbro acquired Milton Bradley in 1984, and the brand continues within Hasbro's games division.