Monopoly

Since the game was created, more than one billion people have played it, making it "the most played (commercial) board game in the world." The 1999 Guinness Book of Records cited Hasbro's previous statistic of 500 million people having played Monopoly. Games Magazine has inducted Monopoly into its Hall of Fame. The mascot for the game, known as Mr. Monopoly or Rich Uncle Pennybags, is a mustached man in morning dress with a top hat.
The history of Monopoly can be traced back to 1903, when a Quaker woman named Elizabeth (Lizzie) J. Magie Phillips created a game through which she hoped to be able to explain the single tax theory of Henry George (it was intended to illustrate the negative aspects of concentrating land in private monopolies). Her game, The Landlord's Game, was commercially published in 1924. Other interested game players redeveloped the game, some changing its name to Auction Monopoly and later to plain Monopoly, and many making their own sets customized for their own cities. Several people, mostly in the U.S. Midwest and near the U.S. East Coast, contributed to the American version of the game's design and evolution. Phillips herself patented a revised edition of the game in 1923, and similar games of this nature were published commercially.
Charles Darrow is known to have played an Atlantic City variation of "Monopoly", created by his friends, the Todds, who lived in Philadelphia. He was made unemployed in the 1929 crash and decided to sell copies of the game taught to him by the Todds. He launched it in 1933 and it quickly made him rich. In most cases, it is still true today that the value of the spaces on the board reflect the actual condition of the real streets in Atlantic City with Boardwalk and Park Place being the nicest and Mediterranean and Baltic not very nice. In 1935 Parker Brothers bought the rights from Darrow and started manufacturing a slightly updated version. In the same year Waddingtons bought the UK rights to the game and made a version based on the streets of London.