A Hasbro alumnus, a short partnership and a licence to Milton Bradley.

Connect 4 is a game of dropping discs into an upright grid. English Wikipedia says it was created by Howard Wexler and went on sale under the Connect Four trademark from Milton Bradley in February 1974. A profile in the Winter 2001 issue of CUNY Matters, the newspaper of the City University of New York, describes Wexler as a City College graduate with a doctorate in psychology who headed his own toy-design company, Interplay, and had developed products for Hasbro, Mattel and Milton Bradley. It lists Connect Four, “introduced in 1974,” among his creations, and says he was then working on a version for toddlers.

Wexler’s own account, published on his website, places the game in a short business partnership. He says he worked at Hasbro in Rhode Island from 1970 to 1972, in a new marketing group headed by Stephen Hassenfeld, where part of his job was to review products submitted by outside inventors and their representatives. There he met Ned Strongin, a businessman who brought toys to Hasbro for consideration. Wexler says the two men entered a partnership in 1973 that lasted less than a year, that Connect Four was one of the many games he came up with in that period, and that he persuaded Dick Harris of Milton Bradley to license it. When the partnership was dissolved on friendly terms, he writes, Strongin remained a financial partner in Connect Four.

Strongin’s family has described the game’s development differently. A Newport Beach Independent profile by Sara Hall, published on 13 May 2011, described Strongin as a co-creator of the game. His son, Mike Strongin, told the paper that the two men worked on it at their shared business, Strongin and Wexler Corp., and that they bought the game as a horizontal board game and made changes to it, among them turning it upright into a vertical game.

The play itself is quick to describe. English Wikipedia sets out a grid of six rows and seven columns, suspended upright. Two players each take a colour and drop discs into the columns in turn; each disc falls to the lowest open space, and the winner is the player who lines up four of their own discs horizontally, vertically or diagonally. If the grid fills before anyone does, the game is a draw.

Milton Bradley, Hasbro and Hasbro Gaming.

Milton Bradley was a long-established games company when it took on Connect Four. English Wikipedia dates the company to 1860, when Milton Bradley set up a lithography shop in Springfield, Massachusetts, and says that in the late 1960s the company moved its manufacturing from Springfield to a newly built plant in East Longmeadow, Massachusetts. In May 1984 The New York Times reported that Hasbro Industries of Pawtucket, Rhode Island, had agreed to acquire the Milton Bradley Company, with the merger expected to be completed in late August that year. Hasbro has owned Milton Bradley, and with it Connect Four, since 1984.

The Milton Bradley name did not last as a company. Wikipedia says Milton Bradley merged with its sister company Parker Brothers in 1998 to form Hasbro Games, and that the two names continued as brands until 2009, when Hasbro dropped them in favour of its own name, since adjusted to Hasbro Gaming. Wexler, for his part, says on his website that he has continued to present his inventions to Hasbro every year, including new Connect Four products.

The game has been published in many formats. Wikipedia records a version for the Microvision handheld video game console in 1979, developed by Robert Hoffberg, and one for the Texas Instruments 99/4 computer the same year. In 2007 Milton Bradley published Connect Four Stackers, played with discs on a flat board rather than in a grid, and in 2008 Hasbro released Connect 4×4, with a two-layer grid for four players and blocking discs. Wikipedia also lists a ticket-redemption arcade game released by Bay Tek Games under licence from Hasbro in 2013, a Winning Moves variant with a tower of twisting rings in 2015, and Connect 4 Shots, a 2018 Hasbro version in which players bounce coloured balls into the grid.

Hasbro also produces giant editions for outdoor use, including one built from weather-resistant wood, Wikipedia says. Several versions of Hasbro’s standard grid let players release discs from the bottom one at a time, which allows variations on the basic game, and some earlier editions included specially marked discs and cardboard column extenders for further variations. Wikipedia adds that the game appeared as “Connect 4 Basketball”, played with coloured balls, on the Hub television network’s game show Family Game Night.

Design and documentation.

Toy and game packaging does a different job from most retail packaging, because the box is often the first thing a child sees and the last thing an adult reads before buying. Many toys are sold in a window box, a carton with a cut-out panel covered in clear film so that the product itself can be seen on the shelf. Card and party games more often come in a tuck box, a small folded carton with a flap that tucks in at the top, sized to fit in a pocket or a drawer.

Board games and larger toys tend to use a two-piece box with a printed lid, and the lid has long carried photography or illustration of people playing, so that the picture shows how the game or toy is used as much as what is inside. A logo on a toy or game box usually has to work at several sizes: across the front of a lid, along a narrow side panel when the box is stacked, and on the pieces, cards or the product itself.

Each guide that follows looks at how one name has been carried on its boxes, logos and advertising over time, and who has owned that name along the way.

A name that states the goal, and a numeral that replaced a word.

The Connect 4 name works as an instruction. The trademark under which Milton Bradley launched the game in 1974 spelled the number out as Connect Four, and English Wikipedia’s article still uses that form. Hasbro’s own instruction sheets, as cited by Wikipedia, title the game Connect 4 in 2009 and shorten it to C4 on a 2012 sheet for the Classic Grid, and Hasbro’s later versions include Connect 4×4 and Connect 4 Shots. Wikipedia lists other names under which the same grid game has been sold or played, among them Four in a Row, Four Up, Plot Four, Find Four, Drop Four and Captain’s Mistress, and records that it was known as Gravitrips in the Soviet Union.

The advertising built on the same idea of a sudden four in a row. English Wikipedia quotes the object of the game from a Milton Bradley television commercial: “Connect four of your discs in a row while preventing your opponent from doing the same. But, look out — your opponent can sneak up on you and win the game!” Wikipedia identifies the spot by its line “Pretty Sneaky, Sis”. Its worked example of play uses yellow discs for one player and red for the other, dropped into an empty board starting in the centre column.

The variants Wikipedia lists keep the goal of four in a row while changing the frame: a flat board in Connect Four Stackers, a double grid for four players in Connect 4×4, a tower of rings that twist independently in Connect Four Twist & Turn, and coloured balls bounced into the grid instead of dropped discs in Connect 4 Shots. The game has also moved off the table, to a handheld console and a home computer in 1979 and to an arcade cabinet in 2013.

For a design guide, Connect 4 shows how a name that states the goal, a numeral and a simple frame can carry a game from a short partnership in New York through Milton Bradley to Hasbro Gaming. Compare it with Jenga, another game sold under the Milton Bradley name, and Play-Doh, another Hasbro brand. For this guide we use grid blue, disc red and disc yellow with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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