Discontinued plastic labyrinth

Of all the toys in the catalogue, this is the one we can guarantee they’ll never bring back. The kid’s-plaything equivalent of a CFC-coolant fridge or leaded-petrol engine, the Mercury Maze was so-called because it contained a measured blob of everyone’s favourite poisonous liquid metal.

As with pretty much every maze puzzle since the dawn of time, the object was to steer this blob along the correct path to the centre of the board whereupon it would fall through a hole and return to the start at the outside again. The unique selling point of the game, of course, was the increased difficulty posed by mercury’s predisposition for splitting in two and heading off in different directions. Essentially, the game was a boiling down of man’s age-old struggle to maintain a steady hand whilst compensating for the surface-tension and viscosity of a base element, although they didn’t think to write that on the box.

In the catalogues of the day, they used to stock these in the same section as the desk-based Newton’s Cradle, magnetic sculptures and so on, which added the Mercury Maze an air of laissez-faire sophistication that was perhaps undeserved of a potentially lethal toy. Of the few varieties we recall, the most memorable was the hexagon-shaped maze, manufactured in regulation matt black plastic with the very minimum of extraneous markings and a transparent cover. Outside of the last day of term classroom, the only place these rare creatures could be found was in the toy department of British Home Stores, where it became quickly apparent that if the game was held upside down the mercury would collect in the lid, reform into one blob, and the maze itself could be bypassed. We are sure that this, as much as the toxic qualities of the game, served to ensure its short-livedness in the affections of the nation’s youth¹, although we’re similarly surprised it wasn’t revived in the mid-Nineties to cash in on the then-groundbreaking Terminator 2 film, which it clearly influenced.