Word: toy
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...integrated circuit nearly malfunctioned over the review of my worth as an electronic toy. My play value is for children and comes not from using my arms and legs "like a true robot," but from the science-fiction fantasy inspired by my electronic audio and visual effects...
...Older brothers and sisters are more nonchalant; they can be downright businesslike about it. A camera would be O.K., but how about a snowmobile? As the day approaches, the spirit settles over them, too, like fresh snow on a busy town. Parents come round last, rushing from toy stores to cocktail parties, muttering about the cost of evergreen trees, chilled by the cold glare of Christmas bills to come. By Christmas Eve, though, everybody is a willing conspirator...
...powerful element of fantasy in Space Invaders is the focus at which the computer technicians, the toy manufacturers and the games theorists seem likeliest to meet. Computer boffins at Manhattan's Rockefeller University play a game called Hunt the Wumpus, in which the Ph.D. devouring Wumpus is hunted through the perils of a 20-room cave. Computer language is flat and unresonant, and Hunt the Wumpus lacks a certain dash. But a toymaker may say, "Give me a way to display a Wumpus! Make him buzz and light up!" and next Christmas everyone may be going into debt...
When hand-held computer toys and games first appeared on the market two years ago, retail sales climbed briskly to between $35 million and $40 million. This year's retail sales should be ten times greater (against total toy sales of about $5.5 billion). The great beep forward came when Milton Bradley noticed that adults were buying its innovative Simon -for themselves, and not just in the weeks before Christmas. The highly seasonal nature of toy buying has always been an industry bugaboo; after Christmas, retailers can get stuck with toys that won't sell...
...toy industry has always been secretive and hysterical, and the advent of memory chips and voice synthesizers has not calmed things down. The designers of Simon, Marvin Glass & Associates of Chicago, refuse categorically to deal with the press. At the design department of Mattel, in California, "you knock on the door and they look at you through a little hole," according to one industry executive who has visited there. Inside, "these guys are all sitting around, and they've got little computers, and'they're writing down figures and leafing through little books, and they scratch their...