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...Brunot and Butts sold the game's rights to a company called Selchow & Righter. Butts received a total of $265,000 in royalties; Brunot got nearly $1.5 million. Coleco Industries Inc. took over after Selchow collapsed in the 1980s and when Coleco went bankrupt, Hasbro Inc. swooped in. In 1994, scandal rocked the Scrabblesphere when Hasbro announced plans to remove nearly 200 words deemed too offensive for the official Scrabble dictionary. The list of words ranged from ethnic slurs to playground phrases like "turd," "fart" and "fatso." Hasbro eventually compromised and published two officially sanctioned dictionaries - one for "recreational...
...Scrabble has been translated into 22 languages, from Arabic to Afrikaans. Oddly, the game is sold outside the U.S. by Hasbro's rival, Mattel Inc. By the early 1990s, thanks to its acquisitions of Milton Bradley (maker of Life, Yahtzee and Candy Land) and Parker Brothers (Monopoly, Risk and Trivial Pursuit), Hasbro owned more than half of the $1.1 billion U.S. games market. But in 1993, Mattel outbid Hasbro, paying $90 million for the international rights to the game. Hence the game's weirdly bifurcated homepage at Scrabble.com...
...Scrabble rebellion rages on! After forcing the shutdown on Facebook of a popular Scrabble knockoff called Scrabulous, Hasbro promoted its own online version. Fans of Scrabulous, which had 500,000 daily users, went wild--and not in a good way. A "Save Scrabulous" group now has more than 50,000 members. Other protest groups include "Give Us Scrabulous or Give Us Death!" and "Please God, I Have So Little: Don't Take Scrabulous...
...Agarwalla, just launched Wordscraper, a build-your-own game that, coincidentally, uses a grid the same size as Scrabble's. If a Facebook player happens to make a board that's identical to Scrabble's--a feat that takes less than two minutes--well, it's a free world. Hasbro officials did not comment on the new application...
...Hasbro officials couldn't immediately be reached for comment...