A Pennsylvania patent for a game that throws its pieces.

Perfection starts with a patent. United States patent 3,710,455, titled simply “Educational game”, was filed on 20 November 1970 and granted on 16 January 1973. It names two inventors, Thomas K. Liversidge and Thomas J. Begley, both care of the Harmonic Reed Corporation in West Conshohocken, Pennsylvania, and the company is listed as the original assignee. English Wikipedia credits Liversidge as the inventor of the game and says he owned the Harmonic Reed company, which it also calls Reed Toys.

The patent describes the mechanism that still defines the brand. A housing has an upper face cut with apertures of different shapes — the abstract lists geometrical, alphabetical, numerical, animal and bird outlines — and matching pieces drop into them. Inside the housing, a spring-impelled plate controlled by an adjustable timer throws the pieces out at the end of a chosen interval, and the game can then be reset for the same or a different time. In the finished game the shapes became a set of geometric pieces, while the race against a clock that ends with the board ejecting everything stayed at its centre.

The game reached shops under the Lakeside name. Wikipedia says the original Perfection published by Lakeside in 1973 had a red and yellow board. Its pop-up plate sat under the shaped holes and was pushed down with a button marked PUSH in the centre of the board, and the set included a scoreboard with stackable coloured pegs and red cardboard squares that could block out some of the holes, either to make the game easier for younger players or to make it harder by covering holes while keeping every piece in play. Wikipedia says the game was changed in 1975 to the format it has kept since, with a pop-up tray in place of the plate, and with the scoreboard, pegs, block-out squares and one star-shaped piece removed.

The patent’s assignment records trace the business behind the name. They show Leisure Dynamics, Inc. holding the patent in the 1980s and, on 9 October 1986, an assignment from Leisure Dynamics to Lakeside Industries, Inc.; a later entry records Leisure Dynamics as having changed its name to Lakeside Industries.

Coleco, then Hasbro and the Milton Bradley name.

In the mid-1980s the brand changed hands with its maker. English Wikipedia’s article on Coleco, which it says had expanded on the success of its Cabbage Patch Kids dolls, says Coleco bought Leisure Dynamics — described there as the maker of the board games Aggravation and Perfection — in 1986, citing a report in the Hartford Courant of 19 December 1985 headlined “Coleco Buys Toy Producer”. In the same year, Wikipedia says, Coleco also bought Selchow and Righter, the maker of Scrabble, Parcheesi and Trivial Pursuit.

That period ended quickly. The New York Times reported on 13 July 1989 that Hasbro had completed buying the bulk of Coleco’s product lines, a year after Coleco had filed for bankruptcy protection. Wikipedia’s Perfection article says Hasbro has made the game since then under its Milton Bradley brand. In the United Kingdom, Wikipedia says, the game and several of its variants were published by Action Games and Toys, known as Action GT.

The brand has also been stretched into variants, and each one shows how much weight the pop-up carries. Wikipedia lists Superfection (1975), in which players assemble two-piece puzzle cubes and place them in the tray against the clock; Challenge Perfection (1978), a race between players to fill their own bases, which dropped the pop-up mechanism; Head-to-Head Perfection (1987), in which a player who completes the board presses a bar to pop the opponent’s tray; a Disney Parks edition in 2019 with Disney-themed shapes, reported by Walt Disney World News Today in August 2019; and Operation Perfection (2020), which combines the buzzer, tweezers and pieces of Hasbro’s Operation with Perfection’s timer and pop-up.

Hasbro’s own product page for the game, archived in 2019, lists Perfection among its Hasbro games and describes it in the brand’s own terms: fit the shapes into the matching holes in the tray, watch the timer, and if it runs out the tray pops. The company says the timer can be left off for younger players and that the pieces store inside the game unit when play is over.

Design and documentation.

A toy or game is usually met first as a box, and the lid does much of the work that a label does on a bottle or a can. It carries the name in large lettering, a picture of the thing inside or of children using it, and often a line of copy that the brand repeats for years. Because toy and game names change hands between companies, the same name can appear over the decades on lids printed by several different owners, each redrawing the lettering and the artwork in the style of its own time.

That makes the box worth reading as a record. The name on the lid, the company credited in the small print, the country of manufacture and the copyright line together show who made and sold a product at a given moment, and those details can differ from one edition to the next.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — who started the name, who has owned it since, and how its boxes, logos and advertising have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A name that sets a standard, and a pop that breaks it.

The Perfection identity rests on a tension built into the name. The word sets the standard a player is aiming for — every shape in its hole before the clock runs down — while the mechanism is designed to break that standard loudly, scattering the pieces across the table when time runs out. The brand has leaned on that moment rather than on any single mascot or character. Wikipedia says that when the game was relaunched in 1992, its television advertising used a new jingle, “Pop Goes Perfection”, sung to the tune of “Pop Goes the Weasel”, and that the game was given a new look in 1996 and advertised on Nickelodeon and then on the Canadian channel YTV.

Colour has been part of the brand from the start. Wikipedia describes the original Lakeside board of 1973 as red and yellow, and the shapes themselves — a set of geometric outlines that players have given their own nicknames, since the instructions do not name them — act as a second, graphic layer of identity: a grid of stars, crosses, arches and polygons that reads as Perfection even without a word of type. The timer dial and the switch between START and STOP, described in Wikipedia’s account of play, give the board the look of a small appliance as much as a toy.

Ownership has changed the label around the game more than the game itself. The patent was filed by Harmonic Reed in Pennsylvania; the board was sold under the Lakeside name; Coleco held the business briefly in the late 1980s; and Hasbro, which bought the bulk of Coleco’s product lines in 1989, has kept it under the Milton Bradley and Hasbro games names since.

For a design guide, Perfection shows how a brand can be built around a single moment of surprise, carried by a mechanism, a short name and a few strong colours, and kept intact as the business behind it moved from a Pennsylvania patent holder to Coleco and then to Hasbro. Compare it with Scrabble, whose maker Selchow and Righter Coleco also bought in 1986, and Cabbage Patch Kids, the Coleco doll line whose success preceded both purchases. For this guide we use tray yellow, timer red and shape blue with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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