Jim Prentice

James Mason Prentice (May 29, 1909 – January 16, 2005) was an American game designer and businessman who founded The Electric Game Company. At the age of 17 he invented a simple electric baseball game which went on to become his best-selling game, as well as the first board game of its kind to use electrical relays.

Personal life James Prentice was born on May 29, 1909, in Holyoke, Massachusetts, to Mr. and Mrs. George M. Prentice (née Doherty). Contrary to his later reputation as a sports game designer and the reputation a name like "Jim Prentice Electric Baseball" might lend, Prentice himself wasn't a baseball player. In a March 2000 interview with the Springfield Union-News, lifelong friend Harry Craven Sr. noted "when I was playing baseball, Jimmy was working on his game".

Upon graduating from high school, Prentice went on to major in mathematics at the University of New Hampshire, graduating in 1933. In 1939 he married Elizabeth Ellen Warren.

Game design and career At the age of 17, Prentice invented the Electric Baseball game which would be his bestselling game when he later went into business. Initially developed during study hall in high school, when he first created the game, Prentice had not expected to make it into part of a broader career. However within a year of developing Electric Baseball, Prentice test-marketed it to school children in Holyoke and surrounding cities. By the time he was 19, his game had attracted the attention of several manufacturers who negotiated with him terms for production under contract; Parker Brothers ultimately manufactured the first version, with one electrical engineer of theirs describing it as "one of the cleverest cross-switches yet produced." A compendium on Massachusetts industries at the time also described the game as "the only mechanical [board game] device yet perfected that is practical and easy of operation". Its mode of operation was simple, it was a two player game using switches and relays which would record baseball, and later football and basketball games, play by play, displaying scores with colored lights on the board. After graduating from the University of New Hampshire in 1933, he worked for a time for White & Wyckoff making $14 a week as an office boy, while in his spare time modernizing his game, selling 200 copies within his first months of sales. In the following year he took out a loan and commissioned for his games to be manufactured for him on a larger scale, and in 1935 his uncle Arthur Doherty offered him $3,000 in startup money to work on the project full time. He and his family partners first expanded production in 1937, moving to the 3rd floor of White & Wyckoff No. 2 building, adding Electric Basketball to the lineup. George Prentice, James's father and the company's first president had also served as a master mechanic at W&W, with the game business on the side. His uncle leveraged ties to his former job with the American Writing Paper Company to order supplies as treasurer, and James Prentice himself initially was secretary as well as head of product development for their new venture, the Electric Game Company, having invented all those produced. Many of the games that Prentice subsequently made were tested the same way as his initial baseball game, distributed freely to the local Boys and Girls Club. With rapidly expanding production and national sales the company moved several times over the next decade, to Hadley Mills in 1938, and Norman Mills in 1939 following the opening of a sales office in New York City. During the war, the Electric Game Company switched to producing military supplies, including 20,000 U.S. Army pup tents and 25,000 Navy bed rolls, as well as gas masks, and small parts for 5-inch/38-caliber guns. In 1945 the company again expanded its toy line to other additional sports games, although its baseball, basketball, and football games continued to be successful.

Many varieties of the electric games remain popular today with collectors, with more than 30 years of poorly documented varieties of the baseball game alone. To save money, many were sold with only a lid with no bottom by design, while others were a combination of multiple covers and bottoms as Prentice did this to use up old stock and save money. At that time the Electric Game Company alone used United Box Co of Holyoke and Eastern Container of Springfield for boxes and cartons, Judd Paper Co for paper board, American Electric Cable for wire, M&L Plastics of Easthampton, and Berkshire Plastics of East Longmeadow for plastic components in their toys. By that time Prentice and his company had branched out to new types of games, including an electric "missile launcher" and electronic design kits. From 1956 to 1957 the company had $1,000,000 in sales, having doubled in size every five years up to that point.

Later life and businesses Prentice would sell off his game company in 1963. By 1968 the company introduced the new Electrocraft name for scientific electronics kits. However by the end of 1970, despite previous efforts at these new toy lines and reported optimism, the company shuttered and its equipment was sold at auction.

Prentice would go on to found his namesake PrenCo, which operated through the 1970s, was renamed from the Duramatic Company in 1980, remaining operational until the late 1990s. and remained in Holyoke in retirement. Prentice died on January 16, 2005.