Simon Says
Rubiks cubes
The Rubiks's cube sold 300million units and is considered the worlds best selling toy ever. Invented in 1974 by Hungarian architect Erno Rubik, it was orignally called a 'magic' cube and made its debut at western toy fares in 1980. From there sales skyrocketed.
A cube with 3x3x3 dimensions, each face contained 9 squares in 6 solid colours (the more observant of you will notice the background colours of this site are those 6 colours). These were usually jumbled in a random order and the idea was to make each side all one of the 6 colours by twisting and rotating the mechanism about itself by quarter turns.
There are 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 different positions on a 3x3x3 cube - thats 43 trillion different combinations but despite this all cubes can be solved in 26 or less moves.
I never figured it out myself. There are 4x4x4 and larger versions around. The current world record for solving the 3 sided cube is 9.86 seconds.
Star Wars
Coming soon.
Action Force
Coming soon.
Simon
Simon's a computer, Simon has a brain, you either do what Simon says or else go down the drain.
Launched in 1978 it became an immediate success story, rapidly becoming a pop culture icon of the 1980s. Invented by Ralph H. Baer and Howard J. Morrision, and programmed by Lenny Cope. It was Marketed by MB Games.
Simon would bleep at you while lighting up one of the four oversized buttons, you would then have to press the same button. Simon would then do the same and then light up a second button (which could be the same as the first), and you would have to press the buttons in sequence, and so on, and so forth.
There were two other settings, one where the player could choose his own sequence (seems kinda pointless), and a multiplayer game where any colour pressed incorrectly out of sequence eliminated that colour
Basically a fantastically addictive memory test, even if it was the size of a house.
Buckaroo
I'm not sure this belongs in the 80s, there isn't much reliable information about when it hit the shelves, maybe it was the mid 70s.
It doesn't matter, I remember it being advertised on TV in the 80s. Hang as many plastic objects on a plastic mule, that sprung when the hair trigger was overloaded launching said plastic bits across the room.
There's trememdous fun to be had purposely launching a mini frying pan, guitar or stick of dynamite at someone else's head, I'm only surprised that it hasn't been banned by the H&S fascists.
Operation
This was actually first released in the 60s, but again was another toy I remember being advertised on TV. I never had one, which is probably why I'm not a rich surgeon.
Using metal tweezers the idea was to lift small plastic bones out of a body without touching the metal sides, creating a connection, and causing the nose to light up and a buzzer to sound.
I think it would have been much more fun and taught kids more about consequences if an electric shock was administered instead. To think the person doing your lung transplant tomorrow probably started here.
He-Man
Coming soon.
My Little Pony
Coming soon.
Bigtrak
Introduced by the only toymaker of the 80s, MB (Milton Bradley), in 1979.
A six wheeled tank, which looked more like a thunderbird reject (for being too cool)it had "photon beam" headlamps and a keypad on the top into which you could programme up to 16 commands.
You could tell it to go forward an abitrary five lengths, turn 30 degrees, then go forward a further 10 lengths before flashing the "photon beams" into the sleeping dog's face.
It may have escaped the marketing departments notice that light is made up of photons, but I suppose "light beam" headlamps doesn't have the same ring to it.
Later you could get a trailer to hitch to the back, and watch as it struggled to move anything over an ounce in weight.
Really it was just for scaring pets and putting dents in the dining room table legs.
Commands such as 'do the dishes', 'get me a beer' and 'pass me the remote' were sadly not incorporated.
