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Marley Station Mall opens on February 24, 1987 in Glen Burnie, Maryland

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The wind off the Chesapeake has a way of biting through a denim jacket like a piranha on meth, and on February 24, 1987, it was howling. But inside that sprawling slab of brick and glass in Glen Burnie, the air smelled like buttered popcorn, Orange Julius, and the kind of high-octane optimism you can only find in a suburban shopping mecca. Marley Station Mall was finally open. It sat there on Ritchie Highway like a landed mothership, all gleaming neon and promises. For the folks in Anne Arundel County, it wasn't just a place to buy a pair of Toughskins at Sears or a blender at Hecht’s. It was a temple of the New Age. You walked through those sliding glass doors and the world turned from February gray to a kingdom of chrome and potted ferns. Inside, it was brighter than day. Skylights poured white light across marble-look tile. Escalators moved like patient rivers, carrying laughing teenagers up to the second level where the arcades waited with their Pac-Man beeps and the first whi...
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Did you know there was an 80s computer game about Prince Harry?

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In the brisk February of 1988, the Atari computer owners of Britain discovered a small, digital miracle called Henry’s House . Now, the Atari 8-bit family was, by 1988, a bit like a venerable old relative who insists on wearing a tuxedo to a backyard barbecue—charming, surprisingly capable, but everyone suspected their time was nearly up. Yet, into this sunset period stepped young Henry. The premise of Henry’s House is one of those things that makes you want to lie down in a darkened room with a damp cloth over your eyes. It is a platform game about Prince Harry of Wales. Yes, that Prince Harry. The one who, at the time, was a toddler whose primary achievements involved being third in line to a very large throne and occasionally wearing adorable jumpers. The reception, dear reader, was not merely positive. It was glowing. Magazines that normally reserved their highest praise for things like "slightly less flickery than last month’s offering" suddenly found themselves reachin...
Location: United Kingdom
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In praise of Kilroy Was Here by Styx, which saw the future on February 22, 1983

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I have come here not to bury Kilroy, but to praise him. Or, more accurately, it. Kilroy Was Here is the brilliant concept album released by Styx on February 22, 1983. It's also the album that supposedly destroyed the band, and has been lambasted and mocked by many a music critic and fair-weather Styx fan who possess an irrational hatred of Dennis DeYoung. And by members of Styx who possess an equally-irrational hatred of Dennis DeYoung. Woe unto them who cannot realize that without Dennis DeYoung, most of the band's fanbase and record buyers would never have heard of Styx. Rock critics already had their sharp snark out for the band once it gained megasuccess in the late 70s, and, look, how many times do we look back at a biting critique of an album in Rolling Stone that reads as positively moronic thirty years later? A lot. Critics hate art that is understood and embraced by a circle wider than themselves. But the turncoats among Styx fans cannot be excused so easily. As far ...
Location: Chicago, IL, USA
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CompuServe CB Simulator is the first widely-used online chat service on February 21, 1980

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Dateline: February 21, 1980. Columbus, Ohio. (Where else?) In the heart of the great American boredom, in a sleek, air-conditioned corporate bunker of polished steel and beige carpeting, the pioneering dial-up online service CompuServe flipped a switch. Click. And just like that, the universe cracked open! They called it the "CB Simulator." Hah! "Citizen's Band Simulator." Can you feel the mid-century corporate desperate-for-relevance clinging to that name? Like calling a spacesuit a "very fancy raincoat." They were trying to capture the raw, screeching energy of the CB radio, that great diesel-fumed trucker opera of the 1970s. But this wasn't 10-4, good buddy, on the I-95. This was something else entirely. This was the future, man. This was 300-baud acoustic couplers mating with Ma Bell’s lines in a screech that sounded like two tomcats being electrocuted in a tin can. This was phosphor-green letters crawling across your $2,000 CRT like divine r...
Location: Columbus, OH, USA
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Morrissey is the unquestioned Poet Laureate of the 80s on February 20, 1984

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February 20, 1984. The year George Orwell warned us about has already arrived, only instead of Big Brother it’s Maggie in her power-blue suit and the dole queue snaking around the Arndale Centre like some great socialist python digesting yesterday’s dreams. It's Ronnie in an arms race, Dodge Caravans in suburban driveways, and corporate megamergers. The kids are wearing anoraks the color of wet concrete, the radios are pumping Duran Duran and Culture Club and all that glossy, shoulder-padded, pastel-synth nonsense about Rio and karma chameleons, and the newspapers are full of gold medal winners, nuclear nightmares, and Princess Di’s latest hat.  And then—wham—Rough Trade Records, that scruffy little indie bunker in London that smelled of damp cardboard and revolutionary zeal, ships out the vinyl. The Smiths . Self-titled. Ten tracks of pure, unadulterated Northern English misery wrapped in the most glorious jangle you ever heard. The cover: some poor doomed American actor from a 19...
Location: Manchester, UK
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Defender becomes King of the Arcades on February 19, 1981

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Bethesda, Maryland - February 19, 1981 A new arcade machine appeared at the Farrell's Ice Cream Parlour at the Westwood Shopping Center today. The air was heavy with the scent of hot Old Time Franks, Holland Dutch Chocolate sauce, and butterscotch candy. A player piano's automated keys frantically rippled up and down like John Wesley Hardin was expected through the doors any second. And at the center of this electric storm, standing like some gleaming, alien monolith, was the Defender cabinet. Its marquee, a jagged burst of purple and blue, practically vibrated with the promise of high-tech violence. You have to picture the scene, the sheer, unadulterated chaos of it. Until this glorious, terrifying Thursday, video games were...polite. Simple, even. Pac-Man was a cheerful, yellow glutton, blithely navigating a maze. Space Invaders was a slow, methodical march of descending marching bands. Defender? Defender was an assault. It was the digital equivalent of being shoved into a ...
Location: 5400 Westbard Ave, Bethesda, MD 20816, USA
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Jason Voorhees takes a stab at video games on February 18, 1989

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February 18, 1989. The kind of winter day that feels like a gray woolen blanket soaked in cold slush. Down at the local Video King—sandwiched between a fading laundromat and a pizza joint that smelled of scorched oregano—a new kind of terror arrived in a purple box. LJN's logo stared out from the front, that cartoonish red scar across the title, promising something forbidden. Friday the 13th . Not the movies, not really—those were for the drive-in, for the back row where you could pretend the screams were someone else's. This was for the living room, for the gray glow of the television at three in the afternoon when your parents were still at work and the house felt too big and too empty. Now, you might scoff. A video game? How much terror can a bunch of pixels really inflict? Believe you me, dear reader, if you were a kid back then, huddled in the glow of a cathode ray tube, the terror was real. It was the kind of creeping dread that starts in your stomach and crawls up your t...
Location: New Jersey, USA
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