Inventor was mastermind behind The Game of Life
Reuben Klamer, an inventor who dreamed up The Game of Life and many other toys and games that entertained young baby boomers in the pre-internet 1950s and ’60s, as well as their children in the ’80s and ’90s, died Sept. 14 at his home in La Jolla, an area of San Diego. He was 99.
His longtime business associate Beatriz Pardo said the cause was heart failure.
Perpetually cheerful and childlike — friends said he was like an 8-year-old in a grown man’s body — Kramer had an instinct for trends that would captivate the postwar generation.
His creations included his own version of the hula hoop and a variation on the Erector Set. He came up with a Pink Panther show car built on an Oldsmobile chassis and rode around in it to promote the “Pink Panther” cartoon series.
But his best-known invention was The Game of Life, a board game in which, in its original incarnation, the winner was the person who accumulated the most money.
The game, introduced in 1960, reflected the values of the booming suburban culture: Players plodded along a conventional path that took them through school, work, marriage, children and retirement.
Succeeding in the game required minimal strategy and left little to chance — in sharp contrast to Klamer’s entrepreneurial life, which was full of risk and serendipity. His unpublished memoir, which he finished this year, is titled “Blitz, Sizzle and Serendipity: My Game of Life.”
Serendipity even played a role in the invention of the game. Klamer had approached Milton Bradley Co., trying to sell a craft
project. That didn’t interest the company’s president, who asked Klamer instead to develop something to celebrate the company’s 100th anniversary.
As Klamer wandered through the Milton Bradley archives in Massachusetts, his eye fell on a board game that Bradley had invented in 1860, the Checkered Game of Life, which rewarded virtue and punished vice. Klamer was captivated by it — not by its puritanical approach, which he would do away with, but by the concept of playing at life, and by its almost infinite marketing potential.
“Something about the word ‘life’ electrified me,” he wrote in his memoir. “It is one of a very few things that every single person experiences, so the market, to put it simply, was literally everyone on earth!”
He sketched out his idea; an artist, Bill Markham, designed it in 3D, with pop-up buildings; and his friend Art Linkletter, the television host, endorsed it. It was a hit at the 1960 Toy Fair in New York and was soon translated into other languages.
At one point, said Pardo, executive director of Klamer’s
company, Reuben Klamer Toylab, it ranked second only to Monopoly in worldwide popularity.
By now, Pardo said, The Game of Life has sold more than 70 million copies in 59 countries and has been the bestselling board game in Japan for more than 50 years.
In the United States, it became such a part of the culture that it was inducted into the permanent Archives of Family Life at the Smithsonian Institution in 1981.
Reuben Benjamin Klamer, the third of four children, was born June 20, 1922, in Canton, Ohio, to Jewish immigrants from Romania.
Klamer was married and divorced twice. He is survived by three sons, Jeffrey, Andrew and Jonathan; a daughter, Pamela Klamer Singer; and three grandchildren. His oldest son, Joel, died in 2016.
He was inducted into the Hasbro Inventors Hall of Fame in 2000 and the Toy Industry Hall of Fame in 2005.
In 2009, he received the Toy and Game Inventor Expo’s Lifetime Achievement Award.