Games 1980s

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GAME ON! What was your big thing as a child of the 80s, we asked editor Karyn Sparks: board games, early electronics, hand-cranked mechanical gadgets? Find out what floated her boat as a sprog

WHEN WAS IT BEST TO BE A KID? Those who grew up in the 1980s just smile smugly and think themselves very lucky – although I’m sure our claim to be the most fortunate generation could be hotly debated. There’s something about remembering childhood that brings a euphoric nostalgia and lends a strange magic to the simplest things – were those Spangles really such a treat? Of course everyone who shared an 80s childhood will remember things a little differently when it comes to toys. Some will recall playing quietly for hours at the dining table with the ingenious Spirograph (actually invented 1965, for purists, but we’re talking what was around for 80s kids); others noisily shooting cap guns at the passing neighbours (or just scratching the caps off with a fingernail!) Or what about throwing your Tonka Truck off a homemade ramp to see if you could break it? You’ll notice Barbie hasn’t made an appearance yet and, yes, I guess I was a bit of a tomboy, usually preferring my brother’s toys. (Even if he would have preferred me not to.) I desperately wanted his cool Raleigh Grifter instead of my pretty Raleigh Twenty with basket,

but then what girl wouldn’t? In the 1980s social media wasn’t about text messages but real stuff that you could share and swap, such as Pez dispensers and football stickers. While, if you were one of those kids who enjoyed being on their lonesome, then Pac-Man, Tetris, Rubik’s Cube and Slinky served the role of Candy Crush and Killer Sudoku to while away the hours of Billy NoMates. “Margaret? Margaret? A gentleman here wants pirate memory games. Ages 4 to 8... He wanted something a little less pirate-y...” Matt Lucas and David Walliams were both 80s kids and, although there were sadly no Little Britain-style pirate memory games back then, they may well have played with such real Christmas stocking treats as The Flag Memory Board Game, Simon and Guess Who? Because back before there was Google, kids had to actually remember things in their brains, so memory training was popular. In the olden days of making your own entertainment, there was Kim’s Game, played by Boy Scouts and Girl Guides up and down the country, which was just a matter of memorising things on

a kitchen tray and then trying to identify which one had been taken away. But of course that cost no money at all and by the shiny commercial 80s there was plenty of marketing nous poured into making must-have products to tempt the little grey cells. You only have to rewatch Big (1988) for the thousandth time to get a picture of the fortunes resting on capturing the toy market. For me as a child, the most fun to be had in life was thrashing my brother at any game! Some of the most heavily advertised box games on our two commercial TV channels (and before 1982 there was only one!) were Operation, Trouble, Connect Four, Battleship, Crossfire, Mouse Trap, KerPlunk, Buckaroo, Twister... the list goes on. (Call yourself a 1980s kid yet you don’t remember Trouble? Bet you remember the Pop-O-Matic, though, that rolled the dice!) Well that’s the trip down my memory lane. But where does yours lead? How many of these do you remember playing with? And – like Barbie – what childhood treasure of yours have we left out? ve

●❖➜▲✖▼◆●❖➜▲✖▼◆●❖➜▲✖▼◆●❖➜▲✖▼◆●❖➜▲✖▼◆●❖➜▲✖▼◆●❖➜▲ RUNAWAY SUCCESS Would you believe the Slinky dates from the early 1940s and was discovered by accident by an American engineer and named by his wife? It performs a number of tricks, most famously travelling down a flight of steps end-over-end as it stretches and re-forms itself with the aid of its own momentum. Over 300 million Slinkys were sold between 1945 and 2005, and the original Slinky is still a bestseller. Oh the fun we had on the staircase... In 1985 NASA shot a video demonstrating how familiar toys behave in space to stimulate interest in school children about the basic principles of physics and the phenomenon of weightlessness. “It won’t slink at all,” astronaut Margaret Rhea Seddon reported, “It sort of droops.” www.vintagexplorer.co.uk

ve / October-November 2015 / 41


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Games 1980s by VE Magazine - Vintage Explorer - Issuu