A 1980s Childhood (11 page)

Big Trak from MB Electronics – possibly the best toy in the world, ever.
(Courtesy of Martin Ling/ Tomhannen/Wikimedia Commons)

Nonetheless, Big Trak was highly entertaining and actually pretty advanced for its time, storing a sequence of up to sixteen commands which were programmed in through a keypad on its roof. It had a series of directional arrows and numbers plus a few other buttons for things like firing the photon cannon and pausing the vehicle. It was even considered educational and my primary school bought one to teach the children basic programming and control, before realising that none of the teachers could figure out how to operate it just like they couldn’t work the Betamax video recorder or the school computer. The children picked it up in no time, though, and had the Big Trak patrolling the school corridors and noisily annihilating teachers with its photon cannon, which was really just a light bulb under a piece of blue plastic.

Though I was desperately hoping to get a Big Trak for Christmas, I never got one and only ever got to play with the one at school or at my friend’s house. I’m still hoping I might get one for Christmas because in 2010 the Big Trak was re-released. And you know the first thing I’d do if I got one? Teach my children how to deliver me an apple!

The Rubik’s Cube was irritatingly difficult to solve, wasted huge amounts of precious playtime and encouraged smug smart alecs to watch your feeble attempts and then tell you how they could complete the puzzle in under three minutes.

It was created by Erno Rubik, a Hungarian sculptor and professor of architecture; it measures 2.25 inches on each side and consists of a 3x3x3 assortment of twenty-six coloured squares. The aim is to unscramble the assorted colours by twisting the rows of squares around, so you eventually end up with a single colour on each side. The original Rubik’s cube was invented in 1974 and was called the ‘Magic Cube’, but it wasn’t until the puzzle was licensed to the Ideal Toy Corp in 1980 that it really rose to fame and quickly became the world’s top-selling puzzle game.

I was one of the many frustrated children who spent countless hours trying to solve the cube, achieving no more than two completed sides; I even resorted to peeling off the stickers and swapping them around to make it look like I’d done it. However, a number of children managed to solve the cube with ease and went on to take part in speedcubing competitions to see who could complete the cube the fastest. In 1982 the Rubik’s Cube World Championship was held in Budapest where the assembled crowds witnessed a 16-year-old boy solve the cube in just twenty-three seconds. Since then, the record has been broken over and over again, currently standing at just 7.08 seconds, set in 2008 at the Czech Open. Other crazy cube competitions have featured contestants solving the puzzle underwater, blindfolded and even using their feet! The year 2008 also saw the Guinness world record being set for the most people solving a Rubik’s cube at one time – ninety-six people.

The massive commercial success of the Rubik’s Cube inspired a whole range of new puzzles to be launched under the Rubik’s brand name, including Rubik’s Snake, Rubik’s Magic, Rubik’s Clock and Rubik’s Revenge, but based on my experience of the original puzzle I decided to give all of these a miss.

Cast your mind back to a time when Paul Daniels was popular. Not only was he curiously popular, but his magician’s skills were unrivalled and millions of us would tune in each week to watch his TV programme (
The Paul Daniels Magic Show
, 1979–94) just to catch a glimpse of a new trick. There was no David Blaine-style freak-out street magic, no Derren Brown mind control, and no Penn and Teller showmanship; they were just straightforward tricks performed by a middle-aged man in a wig, telling bad jokes between illusions.

In a stroke of marketing genius, it soon became possible for every Paul Daniels fan to emulate their favourite magician when the Paul Daniels Magic Set hit toy stores up and down the UK. The box claimed it contained ‘150 magic tricks’, however, nothing could have prepared you for the disappointment of tearing into your box on Christmas morning only to discover a measly rope, a set of plastic balls, a few thimbles, some playing cards, a wand, some plastic discs and two die. What, no Debbie McGee?

Fortunately, there was an instruction booklet included to help you make some sense of it all, but boy did it require practice if you had any chance of becoming the next Paul Daniels. Those who stuck with it and practised for hours mastered enough tricks to impress the family and all the kids at school. Sometimes you could even get a stand-in Debbie McGee to assist in the show, although, unlike Paul, I never tried sawing any of my assistants in half.

Thanks to the Paul Daniels Magic Set, I have now learned how to become that lovable fake-uncle figure that can pull coins out of children’s ears. If only children were impressed by that sort of stuff these days.

I guess you could call me old-fashioned but I couldn’t hide my disappointment recently when I discovered my daughter making a beautiful house made of Lego … on the computer. Instead of playing sprawled out on the carpet surrounded by a mountain of small plastic bricks, she was sat comfortably in a chair pushing around ‘virtual’ Lego with the click of a mouse. While the computer helped her create a stunning Edwardian mansion house, complete with beautiful landscaped grounds, she didn’t get to experience the memorable childhood pain of kneeling on tiny pieces of Lego or the sense of achievement that comes from building an ugly, lopsided, multi-coloured box vaguely resembling a bungalow.

Having graduated from spiky plastic Stickle Bricks at an early age, I moved on to Duplo Lego, the large and difficult-to-swallow bricks designed for small hands, and became adept at building enormous towers that reached almost to the ceiling. By the age of 5, I was ready to move on to ‘proper’ Lego with its enormous array of pieces including bricks, windows, doors, roof tiles, furniture, people, animals, vehicles and basically anything you could possibly think of that you might conceivably require to build your own miniature model town.

After filling the living room with veritable cities of Lego, my parents decided to challenge me with the new Lego Technic sets that included more complicated mechanical parts like gears, axles, pins, beams and even pneumatic pieces and electric motors. For my 9th birthday I was given a Lego Technic car kit that contained all the pieces you needed to make a fully working scale model of a motor car, with a working rack and pinion steering system, coil spring suspension, forward and reverse gearbox and an electric motor with remote control unit. Thanks to Lego I not only enjoyed many happy hours of play, but I also learnt some fundamental principles of engineering and general mechanics.

In the mid-1970s, Atari came up with what it thought was another sure-fire arcade game success story. They innocently named it Touch Me, but the problem was few people ever did, because the actual game stank. However, a few years later, like a phoenix from the ashes, the idea rose again, and this time it was a success. Perhaps it had something to do with the new name, Simon (like Simon Says), because the game itself was still pretty dubious. Milton Bradley’s version followed Atari’s example, having four different coloured lights that flashed in varied sequences which players had to remember and then copy. After its launch at the
place du jour
, Studio 54 in New York, in 1978, Simon more than earned its place in pop culture and became the must-have Christmas present for that year.

An original MB Simon game, although you would be forgiven for thinking it was a smoke detector.
(Courtesy of Ian Falconer/Wikimedia Commons)

The game, invented by Ralph H. Baer and Howard J. Morrison, was one of the earliest examples of microchip technology being used outside of computer gaming. You could choose from three levels of gaming to match your level of memory prowess: Standard Simon, Challenge Simon or Group Simon. The premise was very similar with each level. Simon would light up the buttons in a random sequence and the players would have to remember the sequence and play it back correctly by pressing the buttons in order. You could set the difficulty levels to control the length of the sequence and also the speed at which they flashed. But if you hit a wrong button when playing back the sequence, Simon would express his disappointment by blowing a soul-destroying electronic raspberry. Then it was back to the beginning.

Perhaps the most bizarre aspect of Milton Bradley’s marketing campaign was that Simon was directed towards middle-class suburbia as the ideal game to play after a sophisticated dinner party. Since when did flashing lights and surging adrenaline levels go well with cheese and pineapple on sticks? Instead, most people preferred to picture the game as educational – helping to improve hand-to-eye coordination and, of course, memory.

Over the years, the game’s design hasn’t really altered; it still looks like a smoke detector and has remained as chunky as always. Yet there is something about its colourful (red, green, blue and yellow) iconic design that makes it a winner. In 1979 Milton Bradley released the eight-buttoned Super Simon so players could try to outdo each other at the same time; later came Pocket Simon for the truly addicted.

Ah, now here’s a classy game of skill. Or make that blind panic and frantic arm-waving. If there was ever a game designed to warn children about the dangers of the ailment now known as RSI (Repetitive Strain Injury) then Hungry Hungry Hippos was it.

But physical pain was never enough to stop children playing; in fact, it made us play more. After all, Hungry Hungry Hippos was not so much about seeing who could feed their hippo the most, but rather about whose wrist could hold out the longest (which in the end meant the same thing).

Hungry Hungry Hippos, which was first produced in 1978 by Milton Bradley, consisted of a plastic moulded dish-like board with various nooks and crannies. On each of its sides nestled a plastic hippo – one green, one yellow, one pink and finally an orange one. The most unnatural thing about these hippos (as if their colouring wasn’t enough) was the black levers sticking out of their rear ends. Once the Gamesmaster had emptied the hippo food (small white balls) into the centre of the board, each player had to push frantically on his or her hippo’s lever in order to make the hippo open and close its mouth. The aim was to grab as many balls as possible, which would roll through the hippo’s mouth and into a collecting trough. Predictably enough, the person with the most balls won. The game invariably lasted, at the most, one whole minute and consisted of a blur of rainbow colours and more than a whiff of greediness.

There was, like most children’s games, no real element of skill involved (maybe that’s why Homer from
The Simpsons
likes playing it so much). It’s all about luck. One commentator in the
New York Times
provided the perfect description: ‘The object of the game is essentially to press your handle down again and again as fast as you can, with no rhythm, no timing, just slam-slam-slam as your hippo surges out to grab marble after marble from the game surface.’

Kids of the noughties got their fix from a trip to the IMAX cinema; kids of the nineties would crowd into a vomit-inducing simulator at the seaside; and kids of the eighties held coloured sweetie wrappers against their eyes. What are we talking about? The quest for 3D effects, that’s what. OK, so not all kids had to resort to sweet wrappers back in the eighties – if they were very lucky, they had a View-Master.

Iconic in its design, everyone remembers the clunky red plastic GAF ‘Model J’ Viewer that had us all oohing and aahing. It was our first foray into virtual reality, after all. Basically, the View-Master was a device on which you could view slides of your favourite cartoons by inserting a paper disc and rotating it round with a click of the switch. There were all kinds of discs produced for the View-Master, from educational wildlife sets, the Seven Wonders of the World and even a twenty-five-volume anatomy of the human body, through to tales of Popeye and Doctor Who, Star Trek, The Man From U.N.C.L.E., Here’s Lucy and The Beverly Hillbillies. Each frame also featured a line of text to give a bit more depth to the stories. It was wonderful, apart from when the unreliable trigger mechanism resulted in the frames not quite aligning.

The responsibility for the View-Master lies with a photography buff named William Gruber. In 1939 he envisioned a contraption which could take a slide, consisting of two overlapping images, that when looked at through two eyepieces would present a three-dimensional picture. During a visit to the Oregon Caves National Monument, Gruber met a man called Harold Graves who was the president of Sawyer’s Photographic Services. Graves saw the potential of Gruber’s stereoscopic camera rig and a partnership was formed between the two men. Shortly afterwards they produced the first prototype of the red wonder we all know and love. It was an instant hit.