A Letter to Lizzie

Dear Lizzie,

We are making your game again. We hope this is alright! ​​

You have been dead since 1948 and we cannot ask your permission, which feels rude, so we are writing this in lieu of asking. We are not the first people to remake your game. We are not even the hundredth. We are, however, perhaps the first to try to remake it as you actually drew it, with the rules as you actually wrote them, on a screen you could not have imagined, for an audience that has mostly forgotten you ever existed.

What we know about you

You were a stenographer, a poet, a Georgist, an engineer’s daughter. You patented the Landlord’s Game in 1904 and again in 1924. You held a second patent for a typewriter improvement. You wrote letters to newspapers under a pen name. You demonstrated the game to college students in Pennsylvania. You watched Charles Darrow take your idea, change the names, and sell it to Parker Brothers for thirty-five years of royalties. You received five hundred dollars and no royalties, and a footnote in a history book.

What we are trying to do

To put your name on the box. Both of your patents in the booklet. Both of your rulesets — the Single Tax, the Monopolist — in the menu, as equal options. We will explain who you were on the title screen, briefly, in the way the title screen of a film names its director.

We are not under the illusion that this is justice. Justice would require a time machine. This is a small offering: a digital game, made carefully, with your name on it, played by people who will then know that you existed and that you made a thing they enjoyed.

The game was yours. The game is yours. We are only pressing it onto a new kind of paper.

With love and a great deal of respect, The studio.