This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
In 1981 Steve Jackson sat down with Dave Martin, the artist he wanted for a new project's cover, and the two discovered they shared an enthusiasm for the same odd novel: The Illuminatus! Trilogy, Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson's sprawling 1975 conspiracy satire, in which every secret society in history turns out to be real, warring, and mostly ridiculous. Jackson considered adapting the book directly and ruled it out, the licensing cost too high and the plot too tangled for a board game to carry. What he built instead was smaller and stranger: a card game about the idea sitting underneath the novel rather than the novel itself, players running rival conspiracies trying to seize control of the world's institutions before anyone else does.
It reached stores in July 1982 in a compact Pocket Box edition, deliberately pitched as comedy rather than as a serious treatment of conspiracy theory. Jackson kept the tone close to the trilogy's own: knowing, self mocking, willing to let a UFO cult and a fast food chain and a real esoteric society sit at the same table as equally plausible puppet masters. A later expansion carried a short introduction from Shea himself, joking that the game's very existence proved its own premise: "Maybe the Illuminati are behind this game. They must be, they are, by definition, behind everything."
The joke only works because the source material was already laughing at itself, and that inherited sense of humor is what separated Illuminati from a straight conspiracy board game from the start.