Question: How did Chris Haney, an inventor of the board game Trivial Pursuit, think of himself?
Answer: as a rock star.
"It's like we became rock stars," he told Maclean's magazine in 1993. "People still shake in their boots when they meet us."
And why not? Haney, a rumpled Canadian high school dropout, joined with a fellow journeyman journalist, Scott Abbott, to create a phenomenon - a board game that tests a player's grasp of wickedly inconsequential trivia. In the 1980s, Trivial Pursuit was outselling Monopoly.
By the time Haney died in Toronto on Monday at 59, more than 100 million copies of the game had been sold in as many as 26 countries and in at least 17 languages, with estimated sales of well over $1 billion. And Haney, who had battled through financial hardship in pursuit of his dream, wound up owning golf courses and racehorses.
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Hasbro, which bought the intellectual rights to Trivial Pursuit for $80 million in 2008, confirmed Haney's death. It did not give a cause.
