1. Centipede Board Game – I actually played this, once upon a time, but completely forgot about it until this week. In 1983, Milton Bradley tried to ride the coattails of the insane success video games were enjoying with board game renditions of some of the more popular titles. There was a Pac Man board game (of course), a Berzerk game, a Donkey Kong game, but the one that takes the cake for me is the Centipede game.
Centipede was turned from a single-player shooter into a competitive battle between two players. Each player had a centipede and a blaster, and the objective was to move your centipede to the other player’s base while fighting off the opposing player’s oncoming centipede. While a board game knock-off of a video game seems like a pretty shilly thing to do, this strikes me as a pretty cool way to turn it into a two-player game.
Here’s the game board:
A great image from the manual:
Hit the links in the pictures for a pretty funny (albeit vulgar, fair warning!) rundown of the gameplay from Sydlexia.
2. Dial D for Dalek – Came across this bizarre cartoon created by Christopher Cook and Barbera O’Quinn during the Tom Baker Doctor Who era. Feels like late seventies? Fun to see animated Daleks, even if they’re acting a little Three-Stooge-y!
3. The Environmental Island – Now, this is inspiring: the Shimizu corporation, and architectural and engineering firm from Japan, has a list of proposed projects on their site for ways to live better in the future. One of these is the Environmental Island, a botanical city that floats in the Pacific Ocean. The design boasts being carbon-negative, waste-free, and self-sufficient. That’s a lot of dashes!
Also included is a city in the sky, which pretty much has me looking for a wait list to sign up for.
Found from our friends at Stuff To Blow Your Mind.
4. Fisher Price Talk-To-Me Books – In the late 1970s, Fisher Price introduced a series of Talk-To-Me books. These books mimicked the experience of read-along books, where you played a tape or record and read along with the words on each page, but the kicker here was that the record was on each page!
You used a small handheld record player to play the contents of each page:
We had a few of these books when I was growing up, along with various tape and separate-record read-along books, and while I loved them all I especially loved these because they felt so advanced. I found our player and a few tattered books recently, but sadly it is broken beyond repair. Here’s an ad for the system:
5. EPCOT 30th Anniversary part 2 – Imagineering Disney’s got part two of their photo retrospective of EPCOT up. My favorite of this batch, again, is the shot of the uniforms. Here are the Horizons uniforms:
-ds