Marx introduced Rock’em Sock’em Robots in 1966. The game was invented by Marvin Glass and Burt Meyer, who took their inspiration from a trip to…
Browsing: Toys & Games
Roller skates are an ultimate icon of the 1970s – but the first demonstration of roller skates in Britain actually took place 200 years earlier.…
Rotadraw was voted the Educational Toy of the Year in Britain in 1969. The new drawing tool featured a plastic stencil disc with a series…
“Rough Riders/Four-by-four/You can try to stop ’em” . . . and you would succeed very very easily, actually. Mounds of dirt, doorsteps, a mild incline…
Professor Erno Rubik was once an Architecture Professor at the Budapest School of Commercial Art in Hungary. Now, however, he is far better known as…
Sega/Gremlin’s Safari, released in 1977, took players on a big game hunt in the jungle, trying to bag the heads or hides of four different…
Launched in 1958 by Minimodels, Scalextric promised to “bring the excitement of motor racing right into your home where children and adults alike can enjoy…
Scrabble was invented in 1938 by unemployed architect Alfred Mosher Butts. Butts created the game as a variation of another word game he had invented,…
This line of battery-operated toy motorcycles was originally released by Hasbro in 1971 and later marketed by Matchbox. The 7-inch choppers featured chrome accents, styled…
There have been plenty of toys that allowed children to put their natural creative energies to work. Lego, Erector sets, and countless other similar items let kids…
The hunt was on in 1976’s Sea Wolf, a submarine simulator with realistic sounds (explosions, sonar pings, buzzing motors and more) and a rotating periscope.…
With all due respect to astronauts and other childhood idols, the 1960s belonged to the secret agent. The adventures of James Bond, Matt Helm and…
In the 1960s, toys that could talk were all the rage. Chatty Cathy started the trend when she was released in 1959, but it wasn’t…
Released in the whitewater wake of Steven Spielberg’s terrifying 1975 blockbuster film Jaws, Atari’s Shark JAWS tried to recreate the deep sea horror on a…
Shrinky Dinks entered the toy and craft scene in 1973. Inside the boxes were sheets of plastic – they came with either outlined drawings that…
You don’t want to eat Silly Putty. You also don’t want to set it on fire or drop it from high elevations (it shatters). But…
No one knew what it was made of – in fact, people still don’t know what it’s made of! Certain cities have banned it, and…
“Simon’s a computer, Simon has a brain – follow the pattern of light and sounds.” 1978 was the year of electronic games, and none was…
Sindy (by Exeter-based manufacturer Pedigree Dolls & Toys) was introduced in Britain in 1963. US company Mattel had offered Pedigree the opportunity to licence its…
“Beware! I live!” One of the fastest-paced, most challenging arcade games of the golden years, Sinistar also featured one of the era’s most memorable villains.…