He drove around to storefronts to buy barrels that had been used for items like jam and pickles, then resold them to a processor for a profit. His father, Joseph, started a business called Klamer Barrel Company. Reuben Benjamin Klamer, the third of four children, was born on June 20, 1922, in Canton, Ohio, to Jewish immigrants from Romania. “This is actually the game’s selling point it has no goal,” Ms. Instead of putting players on a fixed path, it provided multiple ways to start out in life - but nowhere to finish. Open Health-Food Chain: $100,000.”Īnd so the company’s 2007 overhaul, the Game of Life: Twists & Turns, was almost existential. It has to reflect the market conditions of the time.”īut as Jill Lepore wrote in The New Yorker in 2007, the redesign teams always had a hard time addressing the fundamental criticism of the game - that the only way to reward a player for virtuous acts was with money: “Save an Endangered Species: Collect $200,000. “And for a brand to remain viable, it has to evolve. “He understood that the Game of Life was not just the game that he invented it was a brand,” he added. Klamer was captivated by it - not by its puritanical approach, which he would do away with, but by the concept of playing at life, and by its almost infinite marketing potential. Bradley himself had invented in 1860, the Checkered Game of Life, which rewarded virtue and punished vice. Klamer wandered through the Milton Bradley archives in Massachusetts, his eye fell on a board game that Mr. Klamer instead to develop something to celebrate the company’s 100th anniversary.Īs Mr. That didn’t interest the company’s president, who asked Mr. Klamer had approached the Milton Bradley Company, trying to sell a craft project. Serendipity even played a role in the invention of the game. His unpublished memoir, which he finished this year, is titled “Blitz, Sizzle and Serendipity: My Game of Life.”
#The game of life car full#
Klamer’s entrepreneurial life, which was full of risk and serendipity. Succeeding in the game required minimal strategy and left little to chance - in sharp contrast to Mr.
The game, introduced in 1960, reflected the values of the booming suburban culture: Players plodded along a conventional path that took them through school, work, marriage, children and retirement.
Klamer’s best-known invention was the Game of Life, a board game in which, in its original incarnation, the winner was the person who accumulated the most money. (He successfully created a toy version of that one.)īut Mr. (He had an agreement for the toy rights to the rifle, he said, but it fell apart, and his toy phaser was never produced.) He made a special Napoleon Solo gun for “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.” that was so popular, the gun itself received fan mail. He also worked closely with television producers and built props for popular shows, including the Starfleet phaser rifle, which could stun or disintegrate living creatures, for the original “Star Trek” series. He came up with a Pink Panther show car built on an Oldsmobile chassis, which he used to help promote the “Pink Panther” cartoon series. His creations included his own version of the hula hoop and a variation on the Erector Set. Klamer, his son said, was young at heart and inquisitive, with an instinct for trends that would captivate the postwar generation. 14 at his home in the La Jolla neighborhood of San Diego.
Reuben Klamer, an inventor who dreamed up the Game of Life and many other toys and games that entertained young baby boomers in the pre-internet 1950s and ’60s as well as their children in the ’80s and ’90s, died on Sept.
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