10 Great 70s Games

Usual Made in the 70s rules apply here, folks. This is not a Top Ten List, but a generic list of fun things that affected our collective childhoods. There's plenty more where this came from, and we'd love to hear from you about toys you wish were on this list.

 

 10. Downfall

 

 

Ah... Downfall... I have 5 red discs, you have five yellow discs, and I must, by turning the cogs on my side of the wall alone, move all of mine down to the tray at the bottom before you do. But here's the catch, see! Both sides have the same cogs, but the little slots that the discs fit into are in different places, so you never know if by lining up your slots from one cog to another, you're actually helping the other player! Genius!

 

Well, maybe not genius, but it was pretty good solid fun. You could even make it even more challenging. Each disc was numbered 1 through 5, try to bring your discs down to the tray in order, and if you failed, you'd have to place your out of order pieces back in the hopper again. A task so Herculean in difficulty, you'd need the strategic mind of Anatoly Karpov to achieve it.

 

9. Master Mind 

 

 

Speaking of games of genius. I was given this at the age of 6. To this day, I have no frigging idea what the game was supposed to be. You had these colored pegs, and they had some colored pegs, and they had to guess your code based on the colored pegs you have or the other way around, and then if you got it wrong you could place either a black thin peg next to that row or a white one and... I think I just turned it into a complicated cribbage board. No wonder I'm still crap at maths. Wikipedia has the rules all written out, but I still can't get my mind around the damn thing. Anyway, on to simpler things for simpler minds...

 

8. Tin Can Alley 

 

 

Yee-haw! That's better! This one was advertised by real TV cowboy Chuck Connors. You got a plastic fence top painted to look like wood. On top of that fence you placed five fake Dr. Pepper cans, painted to look like real Dr. Pepper cans. Then you got a cowboy rifle that did that snik-snak! thing with the lever-action, which was really cool, because that's what they carried in Bonanza and High Chapparal re-runs, and you were good to go! The only thing it didn't have were bullets.

 

I guess that was the beginning of the end for fun toys, really, as someone thought it would be cool to replace a real BB gun plinking cans off a fence, with one that fired child-eye-friendly infra-red light at holes just under each can, which would then fire a spring-action lever that flicked the can off the wall. They got rid of these in the 80s, as dads across teh country got pissed off you accidentally changing the channel on the TV every time you missed.

 

 7. Crossfire

 

 

Thanks to the popularity of Tin Can Alley, Ball Bearing manufacturers were understandably quite pissed at the toy gun industry. How can they sell little metal balls to children if they won't let them buy BB guns? Enter Crossfire, a small plastic box with a cardboard base and two 'goals' in end corners. You placed a BB with tire around it in the middle, filled up a mini gun attached to the box with smaller BBs designed to exact standards of what is now today know as 'choking hazard', and shot the small ones at the big one with the tire to try to get it into the opponent's goal. The opponent, using the same technique, did the same. Imagine Air Hockey, but instead of using those paddles and your hands, you've got Uzis. A fine, fine, manic game, until all the little BBs got lost under a sofa, or your cat dies from eating the big one.

 

6. Ricochet Racers 

 

 

"What do boys like, Kowalksi?"

 

"Well, sir, boys like guns."

 

"Good, good. What else, Kowalski?"

 

"Boys like... cars, sir."

 

"So, Kowalski. Based on these two factors... What do you think should be our next line of toys for boys, Kowalski?"

 

"Uh... A gun that fires cars, sir?"

 

"More...?"

 

"A... Gun that fires glow in the dark cars across the floor, but with a minor adjustment to the safety system can be made to be fired in the air at objects such as, say, cats, sir?"

 

And that's how Ricochet Racers was born.

 

5. Rock Em Sock Em Robots

 

 

Should be filed under simple toys. Rock 'Em Sock 'Em's premise was easy. Each side had buttons and corresponding robot. You press the button, the robot punches the other robot. You hit the other robot in the right place under the chin, that robot's head pops up, you win the fight. Why did this keep us occupied for such a long time? It had no right to!

 

4. Mouse Trap 

 

 

Actually, I'm lying. This game was crap. The commercial, however, made it look like a wicked game to play. Basically, you went around the board, putting together a convoluted mouse trap in about 2 hours that took about 6 seconds to demolish itself, and 99% of the time it didn't catch the plastic mouse. Heck, it wasn't even any good at catching real mice. Heck it wasn't even any good at catching computer mice! And those didn't even move.

 

3. Buckaroo!

 

 

Buckaroo was a spring-loaded 2D plastic mule with a hair trigger, designed to flick little plastic items like ropes, pick-axes, etc., under your sofa.

 

2. TCR Total Control Racing

 

 

Unlike slot-racers like Scalextric, TCR cars could actually change lanes. It was the epitome of cool track racing. You had two cars controlled by the human players, and a third 'jam' car, which was designed to get in your way and slow you down. But, unlike Scalextric, you could actually pass the jam car if it was in your lane. And you could do bridge jumps, which was teh awesome.

 

1. Binatone TV Master 

 

 

Hey, it doesn't look like much, but it's got it where it counts, kid. Many toys claim to be the birth of console gaming, but the Binatone TV Master totally takes that title. It came with 6 games. Four of which were variations on Pong, the other two involved a light gun which looked just like a blaster from Star Wars, so you know that was getting tucked in our belts and being taken outside for playing Han Solo straight away. The great thing about it, was that plugged straight into your TV aerial socket, and the menu was on the machine itself. So you clicked a switch down to change games, and there were switches and buttons for everything else. Without this, Atari VCS, Colecovision and Intellivision would have been alien objects to our generation and we would never have mastered their strange, joysticky ways.