Uncle John's Facts to Go Playtime!

By Bathroom Readers' Institute

A loving look at toys and games—and the people who make and play them—from the past and present.

Albert Einstein once said, “Play is the highest form of research.” Uncle John adds: “And it’s really fun!” And so is this e-book, which includes several classic articles from the Bathroom Reader archives along with a few all-new entries (including an inside look at the Angry Birds phenomenon). So whether you prefer a pair of dice, a deck of cards, a yo-yo, a game controller, or a doll (er…action figure), you’ll find lots to keep you happily occupied in Playtime! Read about…

 

• Classic kids’ games from yesteryear
• The cops who went Wii on the local news
• People who get to play with Legos for a living
• Boong-ga Boong-ga, and other odd Japanese video games
• The little-known (and ironic) story of Monopoly
• The origins of dice, Uno, bobbleheads, and Scrabble
• The dark secret behind Amazing Sea-Monkeys
• The fall of Atari and the rise of Nintendo
• How to talk like a poker player

 And much, much more!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Portable Press
• Release date: Feb 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781626862197

Bathroom Readers' Institute

The Bathroom Readers' Institute is a tight-knit group of loyal and skilled writers, researchers, and editors who have been working as a team for years. The BRI understands the habits of a very special market—Throne Sitters—and devotes itself to providing amazing facts and conversation pieces.

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SURREAL VIDEO GAMES

We begin this journey into leisure time with a bit of weirdness.

Super PSTW Action RPG (2009). The player controls a knight as he runs through the countryside, fighting enemies and collecting gold. But you have to do it fast—you’ll lose points the longer you wait. But how do you get the knight to do all those things? It’s ridiculously simple: Press the space bar. In fact, the PSTW in the title stands for press space to win.

Don’t Shoot the Puppy (2006). Unlike most games, where the object is to do something, the object of this game is to not do something. On one end of the screen is a huge gun; on the other is an animated puppy. If the player presses a key or moves the mouse even slightly, the cannon fires and blows off the puppy’s head, killing it. Game over. But if the player can go 10 seconds without lifting a finger, the puppy lives, and the game is won.

Desert Bus (1995). Created by the comedy duo Penn and Teller, this game has the player drive a tour bus through the uneventful desert from Tucson to Las Vegas. In real time. That takes eight continuous hours. (You can’t pause the game.) If you veer off the road, you crash, and the bus gets towed back to Tucson, also in real time. Each successful trip earns the player…one point.

4 Minutes and 33 Seconds of Uniqueness (2009). The object is to be the only person on the Internet playing the game for 4 minutes, 33 seconds. The actual game consists of a black-and-white screen counting up to 4:33.

You Only Live Once (2009). It’s not very realistic that video game characters get to come back and try again over and over after they die. This game takes death more seriously. If Jemaine, the game’s lead character, dies trying to rescue his girlfriend from the evil lizard who kidnapped her, he stays dead. The girlfriend mourns the death, the lizard is arrested, and a memorial is built. The game then places a data file on the player’s computer that prevents them from ever playing it again.

Mattel was originally a picture-framing company.

FUN ORIGINS

How many of these did you play with? (We played with them all, but it was all in the name of research.)

RUBIK’S CUBE

In 1974, Hungarian mathematician Erno Rubik designed the cube as an aid for teaching math concepts to his students. Rubik realized the puzzle’s possibilities as a toy and ended up selling two million units in his home country—a total of one cube for every five Hungarians. In 1980, the Ideal Toy Corporation bought the rights, and the puzzle became a worldwide craze. Rubik reportedly became the first self-made millionaire in a Communist country.

MR. POTATO HEAD

In 1951, a toy designer named George Lemer visited the Hassenfeld Brothers Company, a manufacturer of pencils and school supplies that was beginning to dabble in the toy business. He wanted to sell them a toy that consisted of tiny body parts made from plastic— eyes, ears, noses, hair, hats, mustaches, a pipe, etc.—that kids were supposed to stick into fresh vegetables to create funny-faced characters. Any fresh vegetable would do, Lemer told company president Merrill Hassenfeld, but, he added, potatoes seemed to work the best. Hassenfeld bought the idea for $500 and a 5% royalty, and made Mr. Potato Head the first toy to be advertised on TV. (That year he also shortened the company’s name to Hasbro.) The points on the various pieces had to be sharp for kids to stick into real potatoes, and they were—until the early 1960s. Concerned about liability, Hasbro decided it would be safer to dull the points and provide a plastic potato to stick the parts into. In 1987, U.S. surgeon general C. Everett Koop complained that Mr. Potato Head’s pipe is not only dangerous to his health, it gives the message to kids that smoking is not a bad thing. So Hasbro pulled the pipe.

TWISTER

In the early 1960s, Reynolds Guyer worked at his family’s sales-promotion company designing packages and displays. He also created premiums—the gifts people get for sending in box tops and proofs of-purchase. One day in 1965, the 29-year-old Guyer and his crew started work on a premium for a shoe polish company. One idea, he recalled, was to have kids standing on this mat with squares that told them where to put their feet…but I thought, this is bigger than just a premium. He expanded the mat to 4’ x 6’ and turned it into a game. I got the secretaries and the designers and everyone together to play. You know, in 1965, no one ever touched. It really broke all the rules of propriety having people stand so close together. At first, Twister was a flop. No one knew what to make of a game where people were the main playing pieces. But when Johnny Carson and Eva Gabor played it on The Tonight Show in 1966, America got the point. Overnight, it became a runaway hit.

BINGO

In 1929, a tired, depressed toy salesman named Edwin Lowe set out on a nighttime drive from Atlanta, Georgia, to Jacksonville, Florida. On the way, he noticed the bright lights of a carnival; he decided to stop to investigate. Lowe found only one concession open—a tent full of people seated at tables, each with a hand-stamped, numbered card and a pile of beans. As the emcee called out numbers, players put beans on the corresponding squares on their cards. If they got five beans in a row, they won a Kewpie doll. The concessionaire called his game Beano. Lowe was so impressed that he tried it at his own home, where one young winner became so excited that she stammered out B-b-bingo!