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Chris Haney obituary

Canadian inventor of Trivial Pursuit who revitalised the general quiz tradition

Chris Haney, who has died aged 59, following kidney and circulatory problems, co-created one of the most successful board games in history, Trivial Pursuit. More than 100m copies of the game, which is available in around 20 languages, have been sold, generating sales of more than $1bn. Time magazine has called it "the biggest phenomenon in game history".

It was during a Scrabble match at Haney's home in Montreal that the idea for Trivial Pursuit was born. On the evening of 15 December 1979, he and his friend Scott Abbott had settled down to play a round of the game, but found that some of the letters were missing. At a loss, they mulled over how to create a new game based on remembering inconsequential facts. Before the evening was over, they already had a design in mind.

With Haney's brother, John, and a lawyer friend, Ed Werner, they formed Horn Abbot Ltd in January 1980. The company's name was based on Haney's nickname, "The Horn", and a slightly abbreviated version of Abbott's surname. The four managed to persuade family members and friends to invest in the idea and raised around $40,000 from 32 people. Haney may have had an inkling the game was going to be successful but that did not stop him persuading his mother not to invest in case she lost her money.

The game was launched in 1981 and, after a slow start, soon rocketed: by 1984, sales had reached $800m. Haney's longtime wish to travel the world on cruise ships, to get around his fear of flying, had become a reality. "It's like we became rock stars," he said.

He was born in Welland, Ontario, and went to high school in Hamilton. He dropped out of school aged 17, a decision he later regretted – saying he should have left earlier. He got a job at the Canadian Press and then became a picture editor at the Montreal Gazette, where he met Abbott, a sports journalist.

By the mid-1980s, their creation had become a middle-class status symbol, as desired and cherished as a Fleetwood Mac album or a Volvo car. The game's achievement lay in its combination of exquisite design and carefully chosen questions. The board was based on a ship's wheel, with six spokes running into a centre circle. Each player's piece was also circular, containing six empty slots to be filled with different-coloured wedges, won by correctly answering a question on one of the six headquarter spaces at the end of each spoke. The idea of the player's piece doubling as a scorecard was simple and ingenious.

The game revitalised the general quiz tradition in America, which had encompassed spelling bees, acrostics, anagrams, word squares and crosswords. There had been earlier pedagogical board games, such as The World's Educator, released in the late 19th century, but Trivial Pursuit managed a more successful balance of learning and competitive fun. The first version of the game featured 6,000 questions, many devised by Haney on a lengthy break in Spain, on everything from popular culture to science, sport and history.

Success brought bumps along the way. Fred L Worth, a fellow trivia enthusiast, had published three exhaustive volumes of a trivia encyclopedia prior to 1981. Worth knew that he could not "own" knowledge in a legal sense, but to protect his creation he inserted a trick question in the encyclopedia, asking for the first name of TV's Columbo. Worth gave the answer as Philip, although the character's first name was never actually spoken in the TV series. (Trivia fans might know that Columbo's first name is seen as Frank on the detective's warrant card.) Worth was incensed when he later found the same question, and answer, in the Genus edition of Trivial Pursuit. In October 1984, he filed a $300m lawsuit against Haney and Abbott. The judge, however, threw out the case before it even came to trial, stating that Trivial Pursuit was "substantially different" from Worth's encyclopedia.

There was a fresh battle in keeping the game alive for new generations. The solution was to create more esoteric versions, including editions about Walt Disney, Star Wars and the Beatles. To date there have been more than 40 different versions. Many devotees, though, neglected the new editions and loyally returned to the regal blue box; the original edition still accounts for a huge percentage of Trivial Pursuit sets sold.

In 2008, Hasbro bought the rights to Trivial Pursuit for $80m. The last years of Haney's life were much like the last years of an aging rock star. He owned racehorses, spent his winters in Marbella and was a keen golfer, investing in the Devil's Pulpit and the Devil's Paintbrush, which became two of Canada's top golf courses.

He is survived by his wife, Hiam, and his children, John, Thomas and Shelagh, from his earlier marriage to Sarah Crandall.

Christopher Haney, inventor, born 9 August 1950; died 31 May 2010

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