Toys & Games

The 2-XL was a "robot with a personality" manufactured and released by Mego Corp. in 1978. This small 'talking' robot came complete with an 8-track...

“Skate or Die!” With its funky circular joystick and boom box cabinet, there was no mistaking 720° in your local arcade. Starring a brightly-attired slacker...

What??? A boy playing with a doll??? Are you insane? These weren't dolls, they were 'Action Figures'. There's a big difference . . ....

The Mego company got its start as an importer of toys and household novelties but in the early 1970s, they began production on an...

Action Man was another product from America, where he was launched under the name GI Joe by Hasbro in 1964. The backlash against the...

Beginning in 1960, Aggravation managed to bring young and old together around the board for a classic marble race. Each player's task was to take...

Was there ever a toy gun as cool as Wham-O's Air Blaster? Not only did the thing look like a spaceman disintegration ray, it...

Ice hockey enthusiast Bob Lemieux dreamed up this popular table game for billiards manufacturers Brunswick back in 1972. Almost instantly, the craze spread across...

Arcade game designers have always been a creative bunch, generally willing to try any idea (no matter how strange it may seem) if they...

Just before the outbreak of World War II, Nicholas Kove, a Hungarian living in Britain, was making inflatable rubber toys. He called his company...

The deceptively simple concept of Bally Midway's Amazing Maze - released in 1976 - was this: You were on one side of a maze,...

In the mid-1950's, Milton Levine was enjoying Fourth of July festivities in Southern California's San Fernando Valley, when the ant minions that he was...

The folks at the Schaper company were definitely the kings of the insect games. They first hit it big in 1949 with the delightful...

Early 1950s fore-runners of arcade games included photo booths which became a national craze and shuffle games which moved beyond bowling with Deluxe Shuffle...

Toy trends come and go, but old soldiers never die. In times of war, in times of peace, those valiant fighters we call Army...

In the years after Star Wars (1977), anything involving outer space, zippy interstellar craft and dangerous battles was golden. Into this arena of sci-fi fantasy...

Californian Nolan Bushnell created a game called Pong in 1971. The following year -  with $250 of his own money and a matching investment from...

This early Atari title wasn’t exactly the black-and-white equivalent of a Swiss Alps nightmare, but it was the closest a video game could come...

In a 1950s West German tabloid comic strip, there lived a buxom blonde character named 'Lili'. She was very popular in two dimensions, so it...

Barney & Friends was an inane PBS children's television show about a stuffed purple dinosaur who grows and comes to life. The series quickly developed a...