The man with all the answers

'E.T.,' 'The Cosby Show,' Duran Duran -- Clay Siegert's dreams are made of this

By Meredith Goldstein, Boston Globe Staff

BOSTON - Clay Siegert was driving from Boston to New York to see his family five years ago when he tuned his radio dial to a pop music station quizzing listeners on 1980s trivia.

He was captivated.

It was trivia he knew from an era he loved, the decade of parachute pants and Duran Duran. The radio game was like Trivial Pursuit, but with questions made just for him.

''People were going nuts," Siegert, 31, said of the listeners who bombarded the radio show with calls, people he assumed were about his age. ''I started thinking, 'A lot of people are psyched up for this.' "

That's when Siegert got the idea for a 1980s board game, something like Trivial Pursuit for people in their 20s and 30s. He would make this game for his own generation, the one sometimes known as X, for his peers who were on their way to acquiring real jobs, mortgages, and children. It would be a game for a generation clinging to a time when their tape decks played A Flock of Seagulls and their VCRs played ''The Goonies."

Siegert, who was working at a start-up energy company in Woburn, Mass. at the time, told his brother and sister his big idea once he got to New York. ''I said, 'Here's what we're going to do. We're going to make a board game,' " Siegert said.

And they did. Clay and his siblings -- Anne Thomas, 29, and Evan Siegert, 27 -- spent about a year researching the 1980s. They brainstormed questions and designed a game, called simply The 80s Game. Clay found manufacturers and cold-called retailers. He lobbied stores to sell it. One by one, they agreed.

''You just start finding these places," he said. ''I was on a ski trip to Vermont, and I noticed a game store on the way to Killington."

When the family was done with the 1980s game, they moved on to the 1970s and 1990s. They went from having games sold at about 50 independent retailers to making deals with Toys ''R" Us.

Now the project is a full-time career for Siegert, who quit his start-up job once the game became a reality in 2001. He runs Intellinitiative Inc. out of his South Boston apartment, which he shares with his wife, Deirdre, and a cat named Daryl (as in Hannah). His siblings are silent partners in the business; Anne, who now works at a photography studio, and Evan, an attorney, receive a share of the profits.

''It was a way for us as siblings to have something that connected us," said Thomas, who was living in Indiana when she and her brothers started working on the games. ''We wore 'E.T.' T-shirts and ate Cap'n Crunch. We're nostalgic that way. We loved trivia. We played a lot of board games growing up. This was a way we could stay close."

From 2001 to 2004, Siegert made multiple games with his family -- there was also The 70s Game, The 90s Game, and The 80s-90s Travel Game -- which are now sold on Amazon.com, at Target, and in some boutique stores around Boston, including the Compleat Strategist and Games People Play in Cambridge.

This year, Siegert expanded his business by making a high-profile game for VH1. The cable channel's I Love the 80s Board Game is inspired by the its popular ''I Love the 80s" series of segments featuring actors, writers, and comics weighing in on 1980s pop culture. Episodes have highlighted ''Mickey" one-hit wonder Toni Basil, Joan Jett, Kelly LeBrock (of ''Weird Science"), Members Only jackets, and mullets.

Siegert was a fan of the show and saw its popularity soar, with spinoffs such as ''I Love the 70s" and ''I Love the 80s Strikes Back." He called VH1 about attaching the network's name to his 1980s board game. Executives were interested but decided it would be best to invent a new game with VH1 branding, something that would involve drawing, singing, and acting, as well as trivia knowledge.

Siegert signed on to create the game, which now is sold exclusively at Target stores across the country and at www.vh1.com.

The new VH1-affiliated 1980s game is simple. Each player picks a 1980s-inspired, Monopoly-like metal game piece -- there's a hairspray can, a boom box, a high-top sneaker, and an arcade game. Players roll the dice and move from space to space, answering questions Trivial Pursuit-style, with categories ranging from ''Rad TV" to ''Dope Movies" to ''Ill Sports."

Some questions require you to draw things from the 1980s, Pictionary-style, such as parachute pants or Strawberry Shortcake. Others ask you to sing. If you get a question right for each year of the decade, you win.

The game has references to the early days of the World Wrestling Federation, DJ E-Z Rock, Gloworms, and Mayim Bialik of ''Blossom." If you've watched the VH1 show, you'll do especially well.

And like Monopoly's Community Chest, the I Love the 80s Board Game has a stack of wild cards called ''Do the Robot," which can slow or speed up a player's race to the finish. ''Your acid-wash jeans go out of style. Lose a turn," Siegert said, giving an example of what one of the ''Robot" cards might say.

Siegert says the VH1 game is on track to sell at least as much as his other games. He's sold more than 300,000 of his original '70s, '80s, and '90s games without the help of the branding and store promotions that are attached to the VH1 game and despite competition from pop culture and '90s editions of Trivial Pursuit.

Of his first three games, Siegert said, the '70s edition was the least popular. ''People say, 'I don't even remember what I was doing in the '70s,' " Siegert said.

The '80s game sparked the most interest, followed by the '90s game, which is best for those who spent the last decade watching television. '' 'Seinfeld,' " 'Friends,' 'Beverly Hills 90210,' " Siegert said. ''It was a great decade for TV."

And, of course, like the '80s game, there's '90s politics and pop culture. ''It's all Clinton," Siegert said. ''A little bit of George Bush early on. The Gulf War. The Noid. Cherry Coke."

Mike Horne, manager of the Compleat Strategist, said the 1980s game has been a big seller at his store, attributing the success to the nostalgia of 30-somethings and parallels he sees between the 1980s and this decade, such as ''a cowboy president," ''problems in the Middle East," and ''John Lennon's death," which recently had its 25th anniversary.

''Certainly nostalgia has something to do with it," Horne said, ''But the 1980s has a particularly strong cultural resonance today."

Siegert is now brainstorming ideas for new games and has two deals in the works. One is with a well-known sports magazine for a sports trivia game, the other with a dictionary publishing company for a word game.

''We're not going to take over Hasbro any time soon," Siegert said, ''but it's a nice niche."