The cult card game was launched in 1972. It consists of four suits of 27 cards plus wild cards and special cards for skipping the…
Browsing: Toys & Games
Introduced by Mattel Toys in 1969, Upsy Downsys were a collection of psychedelic plastic figures in garishly bright colours with yarn hairdos. Each character came…
Invented by Eddy Goldfarb and released by Mattel in the 1960s, Vac.U.Form was based on the industrial vacuum forming process. A rectangular sheet of coloured…
Through tight corridors, against numerous foes, with only a four-way blaster for defence, a solo fighter took on the challenge of Vanguard, a pioneering shoot-em-up…
Venture (from Exidy) challenged a lone treasure hunter named Winky to explore a monster-filled dungeon armed only with a bow and arrow. Our hero was…
In 1971 Mattel released, for the first time, the mighty VertiBird, a favourite of boys who bought toys at the time. VertiBird consisted of a…
Encouraged by the success of Atari, other companies tried dipping their joysticks into the home video game market in 1976. Coleco introduced Telstar Pong, while the…
Despite some industry fears, video didn’t kill the pinball star. Flipper-fuelled action had been an arcade mainstay since long before the days of Pong, and…
In 1938, William Gruber conceived of an apparatus that would take colour photos, the transparencies of which he could lay over one another to create…
Stuck in the mire of the 1984 video game market crash, Nintendo knew it needed a hook to draw gamers back into the arcades. Their…
Wacky Packages first appeared in 1967 as Die-Cuts and Wacky Ads. Using the same form as traditional trading card packages, Die-Cuts and Wacky Ads came…
Atari’s Warlords got Medieval on the old Breakout formula. Instead of chipping away at coloured walls for your own amusement, Warlords gave a more sinister…
The gameplay of Warlords (from Interplay) revealed the strong Dungeons & Dragons role-playing influence on the generation of game programmers throughout the early 1980s. These…
“Weebles wobble but they don’t fall down” The minute they came to town in 1969, Romper Room’s Weebles gave Fisher Price’s Little People a run…
Developed in 1970 by Bob’s Space Racers, the anger-abating coin-operated game Whac-a-Mole did exactly what it said on the tin! There were five holes out of…
Toys of the 1950s often look very simplistic compared to modern ones, yet many toys from this era have endured and continue to populate toy…
“Fight me! I am the Wizard of Wor!” Part Pac-Man, part Alien, part Dungeons and Dragons, Bally Midway’s Wizard of Wor took gamers down into…
The Spinfire, the Mach-1, the Night Winder, the Prowler, the Wedge and the Bonehead. Excepting (maybe) the Bonehead, this reads like a list of manoeuvres…
The first-person shooter game Wolfenstein 3D (created by id Software) was released on 5 May 1992 for DOS by Apogee Software and FormGen. The game…
Brothers Donald and James Herzog developed Wooly Willy in 1955 while working at their father’s toy factory (the Smethport Specialty Company in Smethport, Pennsylvania). The…