‘It never ceases to amaze us’: Canadian-made Trivial Pursuit named finalist for National Toy Hall of Fame

Chris Haney (left) and Scott Abbott play Trivial Pursuit, the successful board game they invented. / A "Trivial Pursuit Generations" game is displayed at the 2023 Toy Fair. (CP PHOTO) / (AP Photo/Richard Drew)

It was a rainy December day in 1979 that Scott Abbott and Chris Haney were sitting at their kitchen table in Montreal and thought of an idea for a new board game.

“Chris Haney and I had a conversation about Scrabble having sold so many games, and he said, ‘Why don’t we invent a game? What could it be about?’ And I said ‘trivia,’” Abbott told CTV News Toronto in an interview on Wednesday.

“I started doodling and we realized that it could be something if we got it to market. We always had a blind faith in the success it would have if we could just get it to market.”

From that conversation—that Abbott said happened at 5:15 p.m. on Sat. Dec. 15th in 1979—Trivial Pursuit was born.

The challenging mix of trivia questions on geography, history, sports and other topics has spawned at least 70 editions and sold more than 100 million copies.

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Abbott credits the colour coding of the categories as being “instrumental” in being able to bring out further card sets and versions beyond the original.

And while there are tens of thousands of Trivial Pursuit questions out there today, the original 6,000 in the first edition were created solely by Abbott and Haney themselves—pre-Internet.

“The first 100 were easy,” Abbott said. “It was the next few that were a problem. And this, of course, was all in the pre-Google days. I think it would be much easier now.”

“We poured through books, magazines, we watched television shows, movies... we couldn’t sit down at dinner without checking the ketchup bottle for potential questions. I mean, we scoured everything we could find.”

On Wednesday, the National Toy Hall of Fame announced 12 finalists for the Class of 2025, opening voting to the public and a panel of judges who will choose which few will be honoured in November.

Among those 12 finalists is Trivial Pursuit.

“It’s been a while, but it’s always nice to get that kind of recognition,” Abbott told CTV News Toronto in reaction to the news. “We were inducted into the Canadian Toy Association Hall of Fame in 2000, so whether this is significant 25 years later, I don’t know, but it’s certainly gratifying.”

Haney passed away in 2010 and Abbott is now the owner of the Ontario Hockey League’s North Bay Battalion, but he says he still gets recognized as the co-inventor of Trivial Pursuit all these years later.

“I’m well known for that connection, and a lot of people have game ideas that they want me to look at,” Abbott said.

“It never ceases to amaze us how the game has continued to entertain people in such numbers. We always thought it would be a game that appealed to our age group, but we found out very quickly that it went much higher and much lower, and seeing it be embraced by people decades later is certainly very nice.”