Brother’s Keeper
As the 31-year-old president of Parker Brothers, Rich Stearns was sitting on top of the world with the hit Frogger. Just three years later, he was selling china. What happened?
It was back in 1975 and I was working at Gillette. I’d gotten an MBA from Wharton and had spent a year and a half at Gillette, when I saw this ad for an assistant marketing manager in Salem for Parker Brothers (PB). I was interviewed and hired in 1977. They gave me card games and action games and what we call “tortured” cardboard games. But they were interesting, especially this codenamed sector with the 1K Texas Instrument (TI) chip. You can Google it. Basically, it was a very primitive electronic game where you find the location of a submarine. We crammed a graph on a little LED readout. At the 1977 Toy Fair, it was introduced and it was underwhelming—it wasn’t much fun to play, but it whetted Parker Brothers’ appetite to get into electronic games. The next year we introduced Merlin. That ended up on the cover of Newsweek. The other game was Simon.
