In 1938 in New York, Alfred Butts invented Scrabble. Well, he invented Criss-Cross Words, a board game based on an earlier game of his called Lexiko. It was most of the way to being Scrabble, but he wasn’t the one that would take it the final step. After Butts faced limited success for a decade, James Brunot bought the rights to the game in 1948, with a royalty from future sales to go to Butts. Brunot tweaked its rules and its appearance, gave it the name Scrabble… and continued to see little success. Four years and one lucky encounter with the president of Macy’s later, that changed and it became a huge hit. Big enough, eventually, to inspire a hit computer game with its own story of rights changing hands.

As the 1970s came to an end, a twenty-something man in Iowa called Robert Walls had a vision. He had a look at the world of early computer games and saw an opportunity. He would build on the established popularity of board games by developing computerised opponents that could play them against you. He would give those opponents a common and relatable identity, a man called Monty. This would help to attract an older family audience than the children that many games were primarily aimed at.

Walls set up a company called Ritam and got to work. First up was Monopoly, on the basis that its relatively limited possibilities made it easier to program. Helpfully, Monopoly was also subject to a trademark dispute at the time that let Ritam get away without an official licence. Monty Plays Monopoly for the Apple II and TRS-80 came out in 1980, got distribution through Personal Software, makers of early spreadsheet success Visicalc, and was a success. From there, Walls turned to Scrabble, a rather more formidable task to program. 

  • Monty Plays Scrabble (Ritam/Personal, 1980, Apple II)
  • Monty Plays Scrabble (Ritam/Personal, 1980, Apple II)

Ritam released Monty Plays Scrabble in 1980 too, but it took “several major design breakthroughs, over four man-years of programming and a lot of determination”, as Robert Walls set out in a letter to Byte magazine in 1982. In the same letter he was also keen to disclaim “any sponsorship or endorsement” from Selchow & Righter, the then-owners of Scrabble. Ritam did soon come to a deal with them though, getting the exclusive rights to computerised Scrabble and making a standalone electronic Scrabble handheld. That seems to have become Ritam’s focus in place of giving Monty any other board games to play.

Robert Walls was not the only one working on computerised Scrabble at the end of the 1970s. Over in the UK, so was Peter Turcan. He was the son of the president of the Scottish Canoe Association and one of Scotland’s best canoeists himself, winning Forth Canoe Club’s Canoeist of the Year award in 1979, as recorded in their Kayak magazine. The same august publication has an early mention of his other activities, noting that he was leaving for England to do his PhD at Reading University. “He is working for the Met Office, but hopes to continue his work in writing programmes for popular games such as Mastermind and Scrabble. These types of programmes are very popular in America where some families have their own computers!” Turcan would later move to America, work for Microsoft, and combine a love for boats and games by making Trireme Commander.

Long before that, Peter Turcan’s work on Scrabble became part of his PhD thesis. He developed an algorithm to exhaustively search available places on the board and possible words to come up with the best score possible. He saw some commercial potential. At which point enter another Peter, Peter Deutsch. He was the owner of Little Genius software, soon to be mostly known as Leisure Genius. Like Robert Walls on the other side of the Atlantic, he saw established board games as a reliable route to computer game success, making a music industry comparison in a later interview with Popular Computing Weekly. “You have to keep coming up with the new Culture Club month after month. But Jim Reeves’s records just keep on going year after year.” 

The two Peters started working together, and soon had an Apple II version of Scrabble, used to play a computer Scrabble championship at the Personal Computer Show at the Barbican in September 1982. Any other evidence of the existence of this 1982 version seems thin on the ground, though. Notably, that 1984 interview describes the Apple II version as having been “written and demonstrated to the public” rather than released. Given the timing and later developments, I think this may be because Leisure Genius faced a Monty/Walls problem. Deutsch doesn’t mention Robert Walls, Ritam, or Monty Plays Scrabble in the 1984 interview, but he does mention a lot of expensive lawyer fees. Monty Plays Scrabble got some updated Apple versions around the same time, and it makes sense that Ritam may protected their newly agreed rights against a rival on the same computer.

What Leisure Genius did next also makes sense in that context, which was to make a British official version of Scrabble for a computer which didn’t have a Monty game, or much of an American presence. They hired Psion to make Computer Scrabble for the ZX Spectrum, which also got them into Psion’s co-publishing deal with Spectrum makers Sinclair. The Psion team working on it included Steve Kelly, who would go on to work on Match Point, similarly building on someone else’s unreleased game. Since the Spectrum version couldn’t have the same disk access as the Apple II one, Psion had quite the task to compress the game’s dictionary to the Spectrum’s memory. They managed to use a lot of grouping and compression approaches to squeeze in 12,000 words while still running at an acceptable speed.

  • Computer Scrabble (Psion/Sinclair, 1983, ZX Spectrum)
  • Computer Scrabble (Psion/Sinclair, 1983, ZX Spectrum)

Despite some initial problems with the accidental inclusion of nonsense words, Computer Scrabble was a success, topping some UK Spectrum charts a little after its release in 1983. Leisure Genius saw a chance for more, and 1984 would be a particularly good time given a broader promotional push for the board game which saw Scrabble TV shows launched in both the US and UK. (Our one was hosted by Alan Coren on Channel 4 and didn’t make it through 1985, failing to get anything like the following of the similarly word-game-based Countdown.) Leisure Genius hired their own team of programmers — Jon Baldachin, Chris Harper, and Mark Stubbs — and worked on a Commodore 64 version of Computer Scrabble. With that computer’s American success, they had a bigger potential audience, but only if they resolved the rights issue. Leisure Genius came to an agreement, and released their C64 Scrabble game in the US under licence to Ritam. 

  • Monty Plays Scrabble (Leisure Genius, 1984, Commodore 64)
  • Monty Plays Scrabble (Leisure Genius, 1984, Commodore 64)

More than that, Leisure Genius actually released the game in the US as Monty Plays Scrabble. Monty, shown as a few shapes that loosely form a face with an impressive moustache, sits in the space between the board and scores. He passes comments like “Not a bad word!” and “I’m sorry you were dealt such a bad rack”. Leisure Genius clearly produced the Monty version first. Over here though, Leisure Genius just released it as Computer Scrabble and Monty got a raw deal, crudely removed to leave a blank space in prime screen territory. This Commodore 64 version sold at a £12.95 price that was a little cheaper than the Spectrum one had, and it reached #1 in the UK non-arcade charts for two weeks in September 1984.

Whether or not the version of C64 Computer Scrabble you play is the full Monty, it works much the same, down to the comments. It lets you play with 2-4 players and any combination of computer and human players. You enter your word and use your cursor keys to move to the place on the board you want to put it. If the word isn’t in the game’s dictionary it will challenge it, but it leaves the ultimate decision on its eligibility up to the player. It’s all pretty intuitive with the exception of blank tiles, which you have to define through a slightly fiddly process of pressing the space bar and then the letter you want.

The original Monty Plays Scrabble was described as a computer opponent rather than a standalone Scrabble game, because it didn’t show you the board enough to let you play it completely on screen. As one review observed “the most probable reason for this constraint is to make sure Scrabble’s manufacturer sells a copy of their copyrighted game to program owners.” Leisure Genius’s updated version has no such constraint. It still asks you whether you are using a Scrabble board, alongside whether you are using a colour television, but it’s no problem if the answer is no.

It plays a fairly decent version of Scrabble, but the main appeal had to be the chance to play it solo against the computer. The dictionary is good enough for the computer to make for quite an impressive player, even if it doesn’t take long to see gaps among relatively normal words (“dint”, “dunces” and “shard” all got challenged and required my manual confirmation). If you had several players it’s hard to see much reason to play it on screen instead of on a board except novelty value, despite the original Monty Plays Scrabble having been advertised as an “old [favourite] that won’t fade with the fads”. 

Commodore User focused on exactly that issue in their review, starting by saying that you’d think a computer version would let you get things started quickly without “all that business of choosing a letter out of the bag, and using a matchstick for the missing Z”. Not so, because “this monster takes a good fifteen minutes to load”. They also raised the issue of players having to look away from the screen on each others’ turns. Those quibbles aside, they did find that “the software is excellent”. Home Computing Weekly’s M.N. likewise called it “worth waiting for” with “a lot of nice touches”. 

At this distance, almost more notable than what those reviews said is just the fact that they were there, Computer Scrabble treated as any other game. The Commodore User review sat between reviews of Spy Vs Spy and Cliff Hanger. It was similar for various reviews of the Spectrum version. Computer Scrabble might not generally get mentioned in the same nostalgic retro game contexts as Jet Set Willy or Lords of Midnight, but it was right there alongside them being covered in the same magazines, and the same sales charts. Variety in the types of games people play has been around for a long, long time.

  • ASP individual formats (non-arcade) chart for week ending 15 September 1984, Home Computing Weekly
  • ASP individual formats (non-arcade) chart for week ending 15 September 1984, Home Computing Weekly

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