Word: crazes
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...through a maze. After 57 years of making pinball machines and, later, video games, the Chicago-based company announced it would sell its arcade-game division to WMS Industries, its major competitor, for $8 million. Video games earned Bally $91 million in 1982, but in 1983 the video craze cooled and profits plummeted to $5.2 million. Bally, which owns four gambling casinos in Nevada and New Jersey, will keep making slot machines and video lottery games, which earned $182 million last year. In the Chicago plant used to make the arcade games, Bally will produce weight-lifting machines and other...
...game business, yesterday's craze is today's closet stuffer. And no company knows that better than Coleco. Its cuddly Cabbage Patch Kids were once every small child's dream, but sales peaked in 1985 and have been falling ever since. In 1986 Coleco made a seemingly shrewd move in buying the company that held the license to the popular Trivial Pursuit game, but soon yuppies began to grow tired of asking one another questions like "Who played the Lone Ranger's faithful Indian companion...
Fame has now turned to shame. In January, with Haiyan on the brink of bankruptcy, the provincial government fired the 55-year-old entrepreneur as plant manager, charging him with incompetence. What had gone wrong? For one thing, Bu misjudged a craze for Western-style suits and ties. He imported machinery that could produce 300,000 Western suits a year, but by the time he got it working, the market had shrunk. Moralized one Communist Party official: "Bu was overwhelmed by the honors given to him by the state and the people...
...Four of the ten highest prices ever paid at art auctions have been fetched by Van Gogh's works during the past two years.The Dutch artist has long been revered for his mesmerizingly bright colors and thick, curvy, even violent brushstrokes, but some experts think the sudden Van Gogh craze defies explanation...
Another puzzle that the exhibit depicts the long history of is the dexterity puzzle. This very simple puzzle--with four balls in a circular maze--caused a craze in the 1880s almost on the scale of the Rubik's Cube fad a century later. The object was to put the four balls in the center of the maze, or place the "pigs...