A toy salesman, a Japanese licence and four named hippos.

Hungry Hungry Hippos is a tabletop action game for up to four players. A shallow round arena sits in the middle of the table with a plastic hippo at each side; each player presses a lever on the back of their hippo, which opens its mouth and pushes its head forward on a telescopic neck, and the hippo snaps up any marbles in reach. When the marbles are gone, the player whose hippo has collected more marbles than the others wins. English Wikipedia notes that some British editions shorten the name to Hungry Hippos.

The game reached the American market through a toy-industry intermediary. Mental Floss, in a June 2019 article by Jake Rossen, says Fred Kroll grew up wanting to work in toys, sold the cardboard games his father made in and around New York City, served in the U.S. Army during the Second World War and then became a salesman for the Pressman Toy Corporation. The same article says Kroll later found Hungry Hungry Hippos in Japan and licensed the international rights to the game from the Agatsuma company in Tokyo, then sold those rights on to Hasbro.

The Los Angeles Times, in an October 2012 report, said Hungry Hungry Hippos debuted in 1978, and Mental Floss says it debuted that year under the Milton Bradley label. At launch, Mental Floss says, each of the four hippos had its own name and colour: Lizzie Hippo was purple, Henry Hippo was orange, Harry Hippo was yellow and the fourth hippo was green. The article adds that later versions changed the colours, the names or both, so the cast has never been fixed in the way a single mascot might be.

Hasbro, advertising and life beyond the board.

Milton Bradley was itself bought soon after the game’s launch. The New York Times reported on 5 May 1984 that Hasbro, a toy maker based in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, had agreed to acquire the Milton Bradley Company, and Hasbro has owned Hungry Hungry Hippos through that purchase since 1984. English Wikipedia records that Milton Bradley was merged with Parker Brothers inside Hasbro in 1998 and that the Milton Bradley brand was used until 2009, after which the games carried the parent company’s name, now Hasbro Gaming. English Wikipedia also says the game was marketed for a time under an “Elefun and Friends” banner alongside Elefun, Gator Golf and Mouse Trap.

Television advertising gave the brand its voice. English Wikipedia describes a sung jingle in the original late-1970s and 1980s commercials, urging viewers to take good aim and collect marbles with their hippo, and a 1990s campaign in which brightly coloured cartoon hippos danced in a conga line while singing the name.

The brand has also been licensed into other formats and other media. English Wikipedia says Innovative Concepts in Entertainment made a redemption arcade version in 1991, in which players won tickets according to how many balls their hippo ate. In October 2012, the Los Angeles Times reported that Hasbro had signed a film deal with Emmett/Furla Films covering Monopoly, Action Man and Hungry Hungry Hippos, with the hippos planned as an animated film for children. Mental Floss wrote in 2019 that the film had yet to enter production.

Licensing has gone further still. Mental Floss says that in 2018 the children’s vehicle brand Kid Trax worked with Hasbro on a foot-powered ride-on shaped like the hippos, with a moving mouth that lets a child “eat” balls; it also describes community events in which people play a life-size version on ice rinks, and says the Gen Con convention in Indiana has held a Hungry Hungry Hippos World Championship each year since 2015. Each of these turns the same idea — a hippo, a lever and a ball — into a different scale of play.

Design and documentation.

A board game reaches its players as a box before it is ever a set of rules, and the box lid usually does more of the identity work than any single piece inside. The lid carries the name, the logo and often a photograph or illustration chosen to show who the game is for, and that image can be redrawn many times over the years while the name stays the same.

Inside the box, the identity continues in physical form. Moulded plastic pegs, discs, frames and trays, printed boards, cards and rule sheets each carry colours and shapes that players come to recognise, and a change of supplier, licence holder or market can quietly change all of them at once.

Each guide in this group looks at a game brand through those layers: who devised the game and when, which companies have made and sold it, how its name and box art have been handled, and what its components look like. It separates what independent, dated sources record from what a publisher says about its own history, and treats the palette shown here as our own interpretation rather than an official specification.

Colour-coded hippos and a name that sounds like a chant.

The Hungry Hungry Hippos identity starts from the toy itself. The four hippos are the part of the game each player physically handles, and Mental Floss’s account of the 1978 launch shows that each one was given a name and a separate colour. The colour tells each player which hippo is theirs.

The name does similar work. Repeating “Hungry” turns a description into a rhythm, and English Wikipedia’s account of the 1990s commercials shows the advertising leaning into that rhythm with a song built around the title. The shorter Hungry Hippos used on some British editions keeps the hippo and the appetite while dropping the repetition.

The game’s mechanism is the third element of the identity. A lever on the hippo’s back drives the head forward and back, and English Wikipedia’s description of the arcade version, the ride-on described by Mental Floss and the life-size ice-rink events all keep the same picture: a wide hippo mouth reaching for a ball. Mental Floss says later versions changed the hippos’ colours, names or both.

Finally, the brand’s history shows how a game can travel between companies. Mental Floss traces the rights from Agatsuma in Tokyo to Fred Kroll and then to Hasbro, while the game itself was launched under the Milton Bradley label, which Hasbro bought in 1984. The hippos have remained the face of the game throughout.

For a design guide, Hungry Hungry Hippos shows how giving each player a named, colour-coded character can turn a simple mechanical toy into a brand with a cast, a song and a recognisable silhouette. Compare it with Mouse Trap, another Milton Bradley action game once sold alongside it, and Play-Doh, a Hasbro brand that also relies on bright colour. For this guide we use purple, orange, green and yellow with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Hungry Hungry Hippos’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.