A lithography shop that found its future in a game.

The Milton Bradley Company began as a printing business. The International Directory of Company Histories (St. James Press, 1998) says Milton Bradley, born in Maine and trained as a draftsman, drew locomotive and railway-car plans for the Wason Car Manufacturing Company in Springfield, Massachusetts, before forming the Milton Bradley Company in 1860 to print lithographs for local businesses. English Wikipedia describes it as a colour lithography shop, and both describe the same episode from its early work: a lithograph of the presidential candidate Abraham Lincoln sold well until Lincoln grew a beard and the clean-shaven likeness went out of date.

Looking for other uses for the press, Bradley turned to games. The Directory says an evening playing an old English board game with his friend George Tapley gave him the idea for a distinctly American one. The Checkered Game of Life borrowed the checkerboard and played on the word “checkered” in the sense of changing fortunes. A teaching page from George Mason University, updated in April 2004, describes the track running from Infancy to Happy Old Age and notes that players moved with a spinner rather than dice, because of the association of dice with gambling. Squares carried moral positions, so bravery led upward to honour and idleness downward to disgrace. The Directory says Bradley took the opening print run to New York, where dealers bought it, and that by the spring of 1861 he was convinced the company’s future lay in games.

The Civil War interrupted that plan and then reshaped it. According to the Directory, Bradley set games aside at the outbreak of war, then produced a compact kit of games for the soldiers stationed in Springfield — chess, checkers, backgammon, dominoes and his own game — sold to soldiers and to charitable organisations that bought kits for the troops. By the 1870s the company was making dozens of games and puzzles, along with croquet sets that came with Bradley’s own printed rules. Wikipedia says the company began making jigsaw puzzles in 1880.

A second line of work started in 1869, when Bradley heard Elizabeth Peabody lecture on the kindergarten ideas of Friedrich Froebel. The company began making Froebel’s geometric wooden “gifts”, coloured papers and paints, and the Directory says Bradley spent months settling on a set of pigments — red, orange, yellow, green, blue and violet — that remained the standard colours of children’s art supplies through the 20th century. When investors objected to the cost of that work in the late 1870s, the Directory says, Tapley bought out their interest and became president of the company.

Shea, East Longmeadow and Hasbro.

Educational supplies carried the company into the 20th century: the Directory lists toy money, multiplication sticks, movable clock dials and crayons among its classroom lines, alongside parlour games such as Visit to the Gypsies and Fortune Telling. After a difficult Depression, the board brought in the Springfield businessman James J. Shea as president in the early 1940s — 1940 in Wikipedia, 1941 in the Directory. During the Second World War the company made universal joints for aircraft landing gear and a revised version of its soldiers’ game kit.

The postwar catalogue produced many of the titles still linked to the name. The Directory places Candy Land, Rack-O and Chutes and Ladders in the 1950s and dates Concentration, a memory game based on the NBC quiz show, to 1959. For its centennial in 1960 the company reissued Bradley’s original game in a modernised three-dimensional form as The Game of Life. Twister followed in the 1960s, and the Directory credits the company’s publicists with getting Johnny Carson to play it on The Tonight Show with Eva Gabor. By the end of that decade, the same source says, Milton Bradley had manufacturing in the Netherlands, England, France and Germany, and it had built a new plant and offices in neighbouring East Longmeadow, Massachusetts.

James Shea Jr. succeeded his father as president in the late 1960s — 1967 in Wikipedia, 1968 in the Directory. The company bought Playskool, which The Wall Street Journal reported on 2 May 1968, and the E.S. Lowe Company, maker of Yahtzee, in 1972. Electronics arrived with Simon, the light-and-tone memory game, dated to 1977 by the Directory and 1978 by Wikipedia; Wikipedia adds the Microvision handheld of 1979 and the 1983 purchase of General Consumer Electronics, maker of the Vectrex console.

On 5 May 1984 The New York Times reported that Hasbro Industries of Pawtucket, Rhode Island, had agreed to acquire Milton Bradley of Springfield, citing Playskool, The Game of Life and Candy Land among its products. Hasbro has owned Milton Bradley since 1984. The Directory says Hasbro’s 1989 purchase of Coleco added Scrabble to the Milton Bradley line, and that after Hasbro bought Parker Brothers in 1991 much of that company’s production moved to East Longmeadow. Wikipedia says the two were merged in 1998 to form Hasbro Games; CNN reported that December that Hasbro made games under its Milton Bradley and Parker Brothers brands. English Wikipedia says Hasbro used the Milton Bradley name until 2009, when it was dropped in favour of the parent company’s own name.

Design and documentation.

A toy company’s name usually reaches people indirectly. Children meet the characters, the dolls and the games first, and the maker’s mark sits in a corner of the box, on the base of a figure or on the back of the instructions. For many toy makers the corporate logo works more like a signature than a headline, a small, repeatable sign that has to sit beside a crowd of louder product names without competing with them.

The places where that mark does its main work are mostly trade settings: the cover of a dealer catalogue, the spine of a retail display, the stand or showroom at a toy fair where buyers see a season’s range before it reaches shops. A company that changes owners, merges with a rival or licenses its name may carry several versions of its mark across those settings at once, and older boxes keep earlier versions in circulation long after a redesign.

Each guide follows the company rather than any single toy: who founded it and where, who has owned it since, how its name and mark have changed, and which lines it is remembered for, with the company’s own account marked as its own.

A printer’s name, a moral board game and a set of classroom colours.

The Milton Bradley identity grew out of the trade its founder started in. A lithographer’s business made its name by printing, and the company’s reputation was built on printed objects: game boards, rule sheets, puzzles, coloured papers and classroom aids. Wikipedia notes that the company was also known simply as MB, a two-letter form that sat comfortably on a box corner beside a much longer title.

Colour runs through the story more than any logo does. The pigments Bradley chose for kindergarten materials gave the company a practical palette for children’s work long before it had a corporate one, and the Directory treats them as a lasting part of his legacy. The games carried their own visual languages, from the moral squares of The Checkered Game of Life to the lights and tones of Simon, and the company’s name tied them together across very different decades.

Since 2009, English Wikipedia says, the company’s former titles have carried the parent company’s name, since adjusted to Hasbro Gaming. Milton Bradley is therefore a heritage name rather than a trading one, surviving on vintage boxes and in the histories of games such as The Game of Life, Candy Land and Twister.

For a design guide, Milton Bradley shows how a printer’s name can become a family-games label, and how a founder’s choices about colour and play can outlast the name itself once it passes to a new owner such as Hasbro. Compare it with Playskool, the preschool brand it bought in 1968, and Scrabble, which joined its line through Hasbro in 1989. For this guide we use primary blue, spinner red and crayon orange with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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