The Binatone TV Master was the first computer game experience witnessed by many Cream era households, nestling as it did in the Argos catalogue alongside the portable b/w TVs (with which it shared a parasitic relationship). Aeons before kids sat hypnotised in front of the latest Grand Theft Auto clone, sacrificing great chunks of their lives to completing the next level, this slab of circuit-based entertainment dragged us in off the streets to watch a box-shaped pixel zig-zag its way across the screen. What a choking irony, therefore, that this gatekeeper of the soon-to-be-ushered-in console era attempted to mimic a selection of sports games. ... more>>>

You have to hand it to some genius at Mattel; once they’d hit on the brilliant consonant-swapping simplicity of the name, the Boglins story must’ve written itself. Essentially near-relatives of the Finger Fright family, these fist-powered fuckers sprung seemingly full-armoured from the ground and onto toy shelves back in the late ‘Eighties. Packed into caged boxes which doubled as display cases (replete with faux bent bars and plenty of “do not feed” warnings) Boglin lore borrowed quite heavily from that other mischievous monster hit of the era, Gremlins. ... more>>>

Every parent of the Cream era sincerely believed that their kid had it in them to become the next Yehudi Menuhin, Herb Alpert or Jose Feliciano (although the generally foreign disposition of such virtuosos implies that their next protege is unlikely to hail from Daventry). ... more>>>

Does it not now seem that, in the ‘70s, the marketing people were trying to sell to parents, not to the kids? What else can explain the prevalence of TV ads throughout the decade saturated with cowboy imagery - the likes of Golden Nuggets, Texan Bars, the Milky Bar Kid… and Buckaroo!? The thing is, mums and dads had most likely been children themselves in the post-WWII era and would’ve been brought up on Saturday Matinees, John Wayne flicks and Wild West adventure serials. Somebody, somewhere decided that these were the folk who had the disposable incomes (nobody having yet invented the concept of “pester power”). ... more>>>

It’s bizarre that this should even make it into a children’s wish list of most desired games or toys, being - as it is – the very definition of the anti-toy. Ostensibly a cross between a savings bank and a chocolate dispensing machine it actually fails to live up to the promise of either. But that is to underestimate its novelty. ... more>>>

Many board games - Kensington springs to mind - usually bear a trite slogan on the side of the box along the lines of “A minute to learn, a lifetime to master”. Surely, then, the motto for Cascade was “A lifetime to set up, a minute to play”. But what a minute it was! Made by mini-car kings Matchbox, Cascade was one of those games where eventually no one really played by the rules, a bit like just reading out the questions from Trivial Pursuit without the board. ... more>>>

The tradition began with Grandstand’s Invaders From Space (we’d like to think that the name was the result of a poorly-administered Japanese translation), a bulky white unit that sported a huge “target” screen decoration, only a tiny part of which actually constituted the display. ... more>>>

Yer commoner garden Chemistry Set box lid always featured 12-year-old boy with brown hair in the pudding-bowl style, wearing a white lab coat and oversized safety goggles, peering intently at a few cubic centimetres of vaguely blue compound in a test tube. The over-serious look in his eyes said it all: “Why won’t this explode?” ... more>>>

If ever there was a warning about genetic experimentation then it was Stephen Gallagher’s 1982 debut horror story, Chimera. A prophetic tale of a half-human, half-primate creature developed by scientists for use in slave labour and organ harvesting, the titular creature went crazy-ape bonkers in the Lake District and killed everyone. ... more>>>

“Chutes” be damned. This was, to all intents and purposes, Carpet Bombing For Fun, as evinced by the explosion noises made by playing kids as they dropped the “chutes” on the revolving target, curiously painted up to look like some presumably inconspicuous fictional landmass, although it did resemble a sort of pre-continental drift Africa, now we come to think of it. ... more>>>