COMPARED to the thrilling gadgets available to children these days, the things that passed for entertainment in the 90s were tragic:
Tamagotchi
Essentially a portable, digitised introduction to animal abuse. Sure, you may have started out with the best of intentions of feeding your weird dog thing every day, but invariably you’d forget to bring it on holiday and return to the traumatic sight of your pet severely emaciated, or dead.
GoldenEye 007 on Nintendo 64
Adults blinded by nostalgia claim GoldenEye is one of all the all-time great video games, especially if they spent the latter years of the 90s bunking off school, getting stoned and playing the multiplayer level. However, show the shit, blocky graphics to a child used to playing Skyrim and it will only confirm their suspicions that grown-ups are completely stupid.
Pogs
Your parents detested shelling out their hard-earned cash on thin plastic discs so you could play a tedious game that required no skill whatsoever, and they’re still finding Pogs down the back of the sofa to this day. Why didn’t you collect Harry Potter first editions instead, you disappointing philistine?
Snake
It now seems a crashingly dull premise for a game: a snake wants food, but if it knocks its head against one of the square walls that surround it, it immediately perishes. For a solid decade children would drain their parents’ phone batteries playing Snake at any opportunity, leaving them unable to enjoy the exciting novelty of making a phone call outdoors.
Furbies
A Furby was one of the first domestic robots and was so creepy that we now insist our household AI looks like a speaker instead of anthropomorphising it into creepy owl/monkey hybrids. The only upside was that you could make it swear at your parents and then act like it was down to this magical sentient being and nothing to do with you.
