It was pretty stressful.' Rajat said programmers who loved playing the game helped resuscitate it.Įxperts say the real risk to Scrabulous is legal, not electronic. 'We were not too optimistic, but Facebook was programmer-friendly, so we put up the game last July. It was last year that one of the users suggested moving it to Facebook, which we had never heard of,' said Jayant. The brothers started a software company in their teens, then launched in 2005, later changing the name to Scrabulous. When the website started charging, he built his own. Jayant is a Scrabble addict who used to play an online version with his father. Scrabulous is a homage to board games we played as kids.'
'We did try to contact Hasbro last year informing them of Scrabulous,' Rajat told the Guardian. Lawyers' letters have been sent to Facebook's US headquarters and the brothers. Now the world's two biggest toy makers, Mattel and Hasbro, who own the rights to the game, want to shut down Scrabulous. Devotees include the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and the Hollywood scriptwriter and director Nora Ephron. Users are randomly given seven letter tiles to form words on a board with light blue and pink squares denoting bonus scores. There is no doubt Scrabulous plays like Scrabble.
