The best-selling quiz game ever made was sued for $300 million over Columbo’s first name

On 15 December 1979, in Montreal, two Canadian journalists got out a Scrabble set and found pieces missing. Chris Haney was a photo editor at the Gazette; Scott Abbott was a sports editor at the Canadian Press. Irritated at the idea of buying a whole new box for the sake of a few tiles, they decided that making board games must be a very good business.

They designed their own on the back of a cigarette carton, in forty-five minutes. It became Trivial Pursuit.

It launched in Canada in 1981 and in the United States in 1983. By 1982 it had sold 100,000 copies in Canada. By 1986, twenty million. Between 1983 and 1988, thirty million, for $750 million in retail sales. By 2014, more than a hundred million boxes across twenty-six countries.

And in October 1984, a man named Fred L. Worth sued them for $300 million.

The trap

Worth wrote The Trivia Encyclopedia. Like many reference authors, he knew a book of facts is almost impossible to protect: you cannot own a date, or the name of a river. So he did what mapmakers do with phantom towns and dictionaries do with invented words — he planted a deliberate error.

In his encyclopedia, Lieutenant Columbo’s first name is given as Philip. That is not a guess or a typo. It is a trap, laid so that anyone copying the book would convict themselves.

A Trivial Pursuit card asks: what is Columbo’s first name? The answer printed on the card is Philip.

Worth sued. His case did not rest on Columbo alone: he showed the game had followed his work closely enough to reproduce his typographical errors and misspellings. On more than a quarter of the questions, by his count.

He lost

And the reason he lost is what makes the story useful.

The game’s makers argued their questions came from many sources, and that the presentation bore no resemblance to an encyclopedia. The deeper problem is simpler still: you cannot copyright a fact. A deliberate trap does not turn a list of facts into a protected work — at best it proves somebody copied something that belonged to nobody.

Worth appealed as far as the Supreme Court. It went nowhere.

What it says about a quiz question

Three things, none of them legal.

A quiz question has no owner, only a provenance. That is why the same questions have moved between games for forty years, and why the quality of a question bank is not measured by how original it is but by what it has checked.

A copied mistake travels exactly as fast as a fact. Worth’s trap worked precisely as designed: the false answer propagated without anyone stopping on it. It did not look wrong. No wrong answer looks wrong — that is what makes it one.

And Columbo’s first name? It is never given in the series. Which means the question itself was bad: it asked for something that does not exist, and a question with no right answer is a problem long before it is a lawsuit.