Poppin’ Hoppies were little mushroom-shaped plastic toys with spring-loaded stalks.
Employing large amounts of saliva and spit, you pressed their heads down to the base where they stuck temporarily due to aforementioned saliva.
Suddenly – when the suction cup dried sufficiently – they sprang into the air with a big pop.
And that was it.
Considered quite high-tech at the time, the little buggers would never all stay scrunched up at the same time for the game to start, so you had to have everyone that was playing leaning on a couple of them each until they were all set.
Related Posts
Canyon Bomber Part of the beauty of early arcade games was the preponderance of "truth in advertising". What you read was what…
Warlords Atari’s Warlords got Medieval on the old Breakout formula. Instead of chipping away at coloured walls for your own amusement,…
Computer Space The history of coin-operated video arcade games began not with a whimper, but with several explosive bangs, rendered in simple…
Trouble Kohner's game of Trouble was introduced in 1965, and back then, a wooden die came in the box. The players…
Avalanche This early Atari title wasn’t exactly the black-and-white equivalent of a Swiss Alps nightmare, but it was the closest a…
Outlaw Released in 1976, Outlaw wasn’t the first arcade game to explore the Old West tradition of the shootout (Midway/Taito’s Gun…
Video Pinball Despite some industry fears, video didn’t kill the pinball star. Flipper-fuelled action had been an arcade mainstay since long before…
Gun Fight Released in 1975, Gun Fight was the first arcade game to incorporate a microprocessor, and the expanded processing capabilities allowed…
