A family found a large, life-sized Monopoly board painted on the floor of their home – a discovery only made when they finally tore up the carpeting to renovate the room. The image of the Monopoly board flooring has since gone viral, as causal onlookers try to discern just why this thing exists, as all. According to one Reddit user, there is a reasonable explanation: “Showed this to my wife, and she reminded me that there’s a whole neighborhood near us, built in the mid-50s, that has game boards painted or tiled onto their basement floors. Seems to have been a selling point or something.”
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Other Reddit users have since chimed in to echo the explanation that in previous decades like the 1950s, this style of life-size board game decoration in rooms was actually a popular feature of homes. Playrooms could feature everything from Monopoly to shuffleboard were built into many homes – even if they were later remodeled to cover that changing trend.
The decorative tradition continues in the modern age, as well. US News reported that Virginia, Minnesota resident Diana Brennan made headlines last summer when she painted a big Monopoly game board (complete with life-size dice and game pieces) in her driveway. Brennan did the project as a way to bond with her daughter (who has Asperger syndrome and artistic talents), and also as a way of being able to interact with family, friends, and neighbors while adhering to COVID-19 social distance protocols. Of course, Brennan thought the project would be much smaller in scale (a chalk outline), but once it got going, it turned into a six-week project that cost about $400 in supplies. But in the end, according to Brennan: “This was a fun project. I adored every aspect of it.”
Monopoly remains a beloved game all around the world and is set to become an even bigger multimedia property. A Monopoly movie was announced at the beginning of 2019, with Fantastic Four director Tim Story at the helm, a script by Andrew Niccol (Gattaca, The Truman Show) and Kevin Hart attached to star. No word yet on how that project’s status after the COVID-19 pandemic – but the Monopoly movie has an infamous tradition of stalling in production, so how knows?
