Very excited to get this as a gift from a sibling and her family for Christmas this year. To be honest, I had never even heard of it but was delighted when it showed up under the tree.
"Please please please," I pleaded as I opened the box for the first time. "Let this game focus on pure Harry Potter..."
Trivial Pursuit, for those of you who don't know, was created in Canada I believe way back in the 1980s and was an instant hit, first in its home country and then around the world. After the original edition, with its six original categories of questions (if I remember correctly, Geography, Science and Nature, Arts and Literature, History, Sports and Leisure and finally Entertainment), there followed the Silver Screen edition (which focused on movies exclusively), the All-Star Sports Edition (which is self-explanatory) and then the Genus II edition, which returned to the original six categories. At some point in there, the original creator of Trivial Pursuit sold the game to a major American producer.
From there, a series of special Trivial Pursuit games were released, one for every major fad that came down the pipe. Despite this serious dilution of its core base, Trivial Pursuit continued to thrive.
It's a story that sounds kind of familiar to Harry Potter fans, isn't it? Humble beginnings, surprising success, a sell-out to a U.S. conglomerate and a rapid proliferation of spin-offs that move the "franchise" into a deeper and deeper dive for profit and further away from its roots.
Although the Trivial Pursuit, Harry Potter edition, has many merits -- it focuses on the original seven, true Potter stories and ignores the inspired mess of Hollywood insipidness and merchandising frenzy that followed -- it also suffers from two flaws:
- It prefers the American versions of the original stories over the British versions; and
- It prioritizes the events of the films over the events of the novels.
The first flaw is perhaps understandable -- an American game maker is attempting to appeal to an American audience and so uses "The Sorcerer's Stone" etc., the name familiar to its audience.
The second flaw is inexcusable. The books are Harry Potter -- the films are merely adaptations of Rowling's novels (and significantly problematic adaptations at that).
So when you face a question in the Trivial Pursuit, Harry Potter edition, like, "Who burned down the Weasley's home?", you know the correct answer is "no one" because, well, the Weasley's home was never burnt to the ground in the novels.
In the films, of course, Bellatrix Lestrange and Fenrir Greyback do set fire to the Burrow.
And when you get a question like "What Muggle game appears in the background of Mr. Weasley's workshop?", you know that there is no answer because Rowling never describes the "workshop" in such detail. Sure, in the film, you see that there is a pinball machine back there but that is merely a choice made by a set decorator, not a creative decision of the creator of Harry Potter.
The least the game designers could have done was to introduce each question with a qualifier -- "In the film version" and "In the original novels" -- to point out the difference.
Of course, I would love to have a TP game that focuses on the books alone. Or even one that has a separate category for the films: "Film Facts" or "Film Adaptations" or some such. But to have an HP TP game that actually treats the books like they don't matter?
Not acceptable. Not even remotely acceptable. But typical of the trajectory both TP and HP have followed since their humble but outrageously creative beginnings. TP and HP have both been sold out and are being exploited by soulless US conglomerates who care more about profit than art, generating cash flow than creating magic.
