80s News Today

America tuned its radios to American Top 40 on March 12, 1988 to find out who had topped the chart that week. Surely the top spot would be occupied by George Michael, listeners thought to themselves. Or maybe Chicago. Debbie Gibson. Richard Marx? Michael Jackson! Imagine their shock when host Casey Kasem announced Rick Astley had just seized the #1 spot, with the single "Never Gonna Give You Up." Americans didn't know it - hell, even Casey Kasem didn't know it - but they had been rickrolled for the first time. And it wouldn't be the last! Remember the video? It was a spectacle of 80s cheese so pure, so concentrated, it could have been sold by the slice. There was Rick, with that gravity-defying hair, that double-breasted suit that seemed to have a life of its own, dancing with an enthusiasm that bordered on…well, something. And the dancing! It was a series of moves that looked like he was trying to shake off an invisible swarm of bees. The reaction was immediate...

March 10th, 1980. Write that date down. Set it in stone. Because that was the day the invaders finally landed, right here in the living rooms of America, and we let them in. We welcomed them, even.  You remember, don’t you? The arcade—God, the arcade—had been your church. That dim, cigarette-smoke cathedral on Main Street where the machines glowed like hellfire and every quarter you dropped was a prayer. Space Invaders wasn’t just a game back then. It was the first real monster, the one that ate the entire industry whole in 1978 and kept right on chewing. Kids lined up six deep, feeding it silver like it was alive, watching those pixelated bastards descend in their slow, hypnotic lockstep while the soundtrack sped up and your heart tried to keep pace.  You paid your quarter—a shiny sacrificial offering—for three minutes of terror. And then, Game Over. You’d blow your allowance in twenty minutes, walk home broke and shaking, and dream about them all night—the endless onslaugh...

Thirty-five years ago today—March 7, 1989—Arista Records released the debut album by  Milli Vanilli , titled Girl You Know It’s True. Now, if you're under 30, you might be asking, "Milli who?" And if you're over 50, you're probably already shaking your head and muttering, "Oh no, not this again." But stick with me here. The album? Huge. Massive. Went six-times platinum. Spent weeks at number one. Had hits like "Girl You Know It's True," "Baby Don't Forget My Number," "Girl I'm Gonna Miss You," and of course "Blame It on the Rain." You couldn't turn on the radio without hearing one of these songs. It was everywhere. Grammy for Best New Artist in 1990. You remember Rob and Fab, right? Two fellas from Germany who looked like they’d been sculpted out of high-end marzipan. They had the spandex, they had the shoulder pads, they had the dance moves. The only thing they didn't have? Their own voices. T...

You have to understand, in those days, Clackamas wasn’t much more than a collection of blackberry brambles and gravel roads that didn't know where they were going. But Ernest Hahn had a vision, the kind of vision that smells like money and fresh asphalt. On March 6, 1981, that vision finally opened its eyes—a million square feet of retail muscle rising out of the Oregon mud like some prehistoric beast. They called it the Clackamas Town Center . The suburbs had been growing teeth out here for years—tract homes sprouting like mushrooms after a hard rain, young families moving in with station wagons full of kids and dreams no bigger than a backyard barbecue. But there'd been nothing to hold them together, no heartbeat. Just the long gray slog between home and whatever passed for downtown.  Then Ernest Hahn's people showed up, that California developer with the shark's smile and the patience of Job when it came to lawyers and environmental hearings. The land had once been e...

A very small thing happened to a great many people on March 5, 1981, and it was called the Sinclair ZX81 . The ZX81 was a computer that consisted almost entirely of Nothing. It had four chips. Not four hundred, not four thousand. Four. If you opened the casing, you’d find a vast, echoing plastic cavern that suggested the computer was actually just a very expensive place for a spider to raise a family. It came with one kilobyte of RAM. To put that into perspective for the modern reader (who likely has more computing power in their electric toothbrush than existed on the entire planet in 1954), one kilobyte is roughly the amount of memory required to remember a medium-sized grocery list, provided you don't buy any exotic cheeses with long names. And yet, it was magnificent. Or, at least, it looked magnificent in glossy magazine ads. It was a sleek, black wedge of plastic that looked like it had been fallen off the back of a passing UFO. It didn't have a keyboard so much as a ...

There’s a chill in the air of late, a final, biting breath of winter before the spring truly takes hold. I spent much of the morning in my study, a mug of ultimate hot chocolate at my elbow, and my mind went back…back to a warmer spring, many years ago. March 1980. A different world. A different age. I was younger then, and my dreams were full of starships and dragons. And it was in that spring that a new kind of magic arrived, contained not in a leather-bound tome, but in a small black plastic cartridge. I’m speaking, of course, of Adventure . It has near finished its fourth decade, that little cartridge, but I remember when it was a knight in shining armor to those of us who craved more than just another round of Pong. Warren Robinett, the sorcerer who crafted this world of thirty screens, had to forge his own tools to do it. Atari’s high lords were oft cool to the idea of a graphical quest, and Robinett was like to be punished for his ambition. But he persisted, whilst others would ...