80s-90s gifts

If your breakfast deserves a special treat that doesn't sound like "standard toast", this gadget is practically a little kitchen companion from Kan...

"I am the one who knocks" - one of the most iconic sentences in TV history. But what if the most famous plumber in the video game world had decided...

With the Pokémon Pokéball sandwich maker, your snack ends up where it belongs: neatly caught between two slices of toast. Shiny black on the outsid...

Red or Blue? Since the first Pokémon games on the Game Boy, the choice of starter Pokémon has divided friendships and schoolyards. Bulbasaur fans, ...

Who hasn't dreamed of turning to Shenlong with a wish? While the dragon himself may be difficult to summon, you can at least treat yourself to a li...

The world of Fallout is full of contradictions: nuclear war and the apocalypse, but all in the cute retro look of the 1950s. Vault Boy grins with a...

On October 21, 2015, Marty McFly lands right in the middle of the future in Back to the Future Part II, marvelling at floating hoverboards, self-la...

Steven Rhodes is the illustrator behind these delightfully dark retro images that look like harmless 1970s schoolbooks – until you take a closer lo...

Back then, when Star Wars was still recorded on VHS, "new" was a feeling that smelled of plastic cassettes and heated tube TVs. And then came the p...

The Pokémon Pokéball Toaster is the kind of kitchen gadget that makes even morning grouches look like they've just stepped out of the Pokécenter. I...

A hundred coins and the counter flips over into an extra life. Hardly any game has made collecting loose change as satisfying as Super Mario, and a...

The Question Block is the politest form of uncertainty there is. It hovers, glows gold and announces that something is inside without telling you w...

A summer job at an ice cream parlour sounds like sunshine and chocolate sprinkles until you see the uniform: a blue and white striped sailor dress,...

In the eighties a black band shirt worked a lot like an ID card. Walk across the schoolyard in one and you never had to explain what was sitting in...

Chrome, Formica and a counter where the refill arrives before anyone asks: the American diner of the eighties ran on a fixed inventory. Somewhere i...

When Joyce Byers tapes the alphabet to her living room wall and hangs a string of lights above it, half of Hawkins writes her off as unhinged. Yet ...

Disco ball on the ceiling, carpet on the walls and the squeak of eight wheels on varnished wood: the Rink-O-Mania roller rink is where Eleven spend...

Some video game landscapes sit so firmly in your head that you could still sketch them decades later: pixelated hills, a chequered floor, palm tree...

In the nineties the lunch box was a status symbol. Anyone who had one with their favourite character on the lid automatically sat at the right tabl...

Sonic never really brakes: loops, springs and shortcuts straight across the landscape, all of it flat out. What the games never show is the breathe...

A desk is basically a straight line: the start on the left with the first coffee, the finish on the right with the end of the working day, and in b...

In these games a single golden ring is your entire life insurance: take a hit while you still have one and you get straight back up, with the rings...

His real name is Miles Prower, but everyone calls him Tails, after the pair of them that spin like rotor blades and lift him off the ground. He is ...

In 1980 a game designer put a machine into the arcades that shot down no aliens and blew up no tanks. Instead: a yellow circle, a maze, four ghosts...

In 1980 a new cabinet suddenly stood in the arcades, with a yellow circle of endless appetite racing through a maze while four colourful ghosts cha...

Mario has rammed his head into those yellow cubes from below countless times, always trusting that a coin, a mushroom or something even better woul...

In the Mushroom Kingdom the important things hang in mid air anyway: the Question Block that spits out a coin after a solid headbutt from below, an...

There is that one moment in Super Mario where nothing can touch you: the Super Star chimes, the music speeds up, and for a few seconds you simply r...

"By the Power of Grayskull!" Prince Adam raises the sword, lightning splits the sky, and the bored heir to the throne turns into He-Man. His oppone...

At the court of Eternia, Prince Adam was long seen as the slightly idle son of the king, the one who ducks out of every bit of trouble with a smile...

In 1993 the most exciting theme park in film history invited a handful of guests to a preview on an island off Costa Rica, and that preview lasted ...

Three rules, that is all it takes: no bright light, no water, nothing to eat after midnight. Break them and instead of one cuddly Mogwai you sudden...

In 1954 a man in a rubber suit stomped through a model city made of balsa wood, and cinema was never the same afterwards. Godzilla was never just a...

Ray Stantz dug the car up as a rattling old ambulance, complete with a fault list running from the shock absorbers to the transmission, and bought ...

In 1993 Doom travelled across schoolyards on floppy disks and through bulletin boards, and the rules were quickly explained: you land on a base at ...

Some posters end up more famous than the films they advertise. A swimmer drifting along the surface with no idea, and beneath her a rising mouth fu...