and product history In 1948, Robbinsdale, Minnesota, postman William H. Schaper whittled a bug-like fishing lure he believed had toy potential, and sold it (and others like it) in his store as a sideline to his homebound business of manufacturing small commercial popcorn machines. Eventually, he created a game around his creation, and, in 1949, molded it in plastic and formed the W. H. Schaper Mfg. Co. Inc. Schaper offered Dayton's, a local department store, several Cootie sets on consignment and the game proved a hit, selling 5,592 by the end of 1950. By 1952, Schaper's company sold 1.2 million Cootie games, and thereafter, a million games a year. By the mid-1960s, Schaper's company was selling more than twenty-five different games from its Golden Valley, Minnesota, headquarters. In Australia, the game was distributed by Toltoys in the late 60s under the title Creepy Critters. Cootie was one of many revamped traditional games cast in plastic by the Schaper company. Several games had bug titles such as Tickle Bee, Inch Worm, and Tumble Bug. The company eventually produced Cootie spinoffs such as Giant Cootie and Deluxe 6 Cootie, a game with six cooties instead of four. In the late 1960s, Sears offered an exclusive Cootie House with a vinyl mat and eight Cooties. Tyco Toys bought W.H. Schaper Mfg. Co. Inc. in 1973 and manufactured the game with a change in the bug design but little change to the original game rules. In 1986, Hasbro, through its subsidiary Milton Bradley Co., arranged with Tyco Toys Inc. to purchase Cootie and three other games from the Schaper Toy Division of Kusan Inc. Milton Bradley brought a new look to Cootie with legs that sported in-line skates, sneakers, and other accessories. Though the Schaper company published other games including Ants in the Pants, Don't Spill the Beans, and Don't Break the Ice, Cootie remained the company's best seller with over 50 million games sold between 1949 and 2005. Other cootie games Schaper's game was not the first based upon the insect known as the "cootie". The creature was the subject of several tabletop games, mostly pencil and paper games, in the decades of the twentieth century following World War I. The Cootie Game fashioned by the Irvin-Smith Company about 1915 was a hand-held game that involved tilting capsules into a trap over a background illustration depicting a WWI battlefield. In 1927, the J.