80s News Today

Paducah, Kentucky - November 30, 1980 Intellivision brought the sport of kings into the family rooms and basements of America today, with the release of the Horse Racing cartridge. But it isn't just a button masher. The game sports a pari-mutuel betting feature, letting players gamble on the outcome. And where does all of this digital horse racing action take place? Right here at Plympton Downs in the great state of Kentucky, the newest track in the Bluegrass State, and home to the historic Rainbow Thoroughbred Stables. If you love the action of Las Vegas, Atlantic City, Reno, Lake Tahoe, there's nothing like seeing it in person. But the lucky gamers who picked up a copy of Horse Racing today are taking it all in from the comfort of home. The best seat in the house! If you're a real sharpie, if you have an eye for the future and a little taste for the action, you got your hands on the Horse Racing cartridge today. And you were front and center when the races featured Pink ...

November 29, 1982 – It was a Monday, the sort of gray, post-Thanksgiving Monday when Manhattan secretaries were still picking turkey from their teeth and Wall Street was nursing its first hangover of the new fiscal quarter, and then, at precisely that moment when the cosmos likes to remind us who’s boss, Epic Records slid a slab of vinyl into the bloodstream of America and the heart stopped, got zapped with a defibrillator, then began beating to an entirely new rhythm. Thriller . Michael Jackson's Off the Wall album had been a smash hit, but the industry, the critics, and radio still wanted to box him in as an R&B artist. He didn't achieve the crossover success he had imagined, nor the respect of his peers on the awards circuit, at the level Off the Wall objectively demanded. Michael was angry. He turned that anger into motivation. The next record wouldn't demand respect. It would COMMAND respect. He spent a year in a Westlake studio with Quincy Jones searching for th...

Hearken, in this year of our Lord the twenty-eighth of November, and in the nineteen hundred and eighty-sixth year after the Incarnation, when the leaves of autumn lay thick upon the ground and the breath of winter began to crisp the air, there came forth from the distant and mysterious East a new trial for the knights and adventurers of our latter age: a challenge titled Castlequest , sent abroad upon a grey cartridge for that curious instrument called the Nintendo Entertainment System. Know ye, gentle reader, that in a time lost to ancient memory, a dire shadow fell upon a peaceful realm. The beauteous Princess Margarita, whose grace was the light of the land, was seized by the nefarious Mad Mizer, a Dark Lord most grim of aspect and foul of purpose. This villain, dwelling within the grim confines of Groken Castle high in the Forbidden Mountains, vowed to make the Princess his unwilling Queen. But lo! The call to arms was answered. Forth came the worthy Prince Rafael, a soul of true ...

It wasn’t the soft, forgiving kind of chill you feel when the first powder of winter dusts the eaves; this was New York City’s November bite, smelling of exhaust and hot dog carts, reaching right through your wool coat like a skeletal hand. The year was 1984, the same year a certain razor-gloved dream-walker was cutting up Elm Street and the Boss was singing about Dancing in the Dark on every radio in America. And down here, on 34th Street, a different kind of darkness was gathering. It was Thanksgiving morning, a day for normalcy, for turkey and football and the relentless, saccharine cheer of the Macy’s parade. But the people lining the route weren't just here for Snoopy or Santa Claus. They were waiting for them . The Visitors. The sweet-faced lizards who had charmed America on the NBC alien invasion miniseries V. The whole thing felt wrong, like putting a funeral wreath on a bouncy castle. The float wasn't a float so much as a metallic monstrosity, a gleaming, angular piece...

November 26, 1987 Somewhere in the Kingdom of Kroz – Level 28, I think Today I descended into what an eccentric software executive-turned-hermit has told me is called the Kingdom of Kroz . He babbled something about a Magical Amulet that controls reality itself, hidden at the bottom of an endless maze of whips, gems, and creatures that look like they were drawn by a sadistic kindergarteners with a grudge. The entrance was a nondescript stone door behind a 7-Eleven in Garland, Texas. One minute I’m reaching for a Big Bite hot dog on the rollers, the next I’m falling fifty feet into a pit that smells faintly of ozone and broken dreams. My fedora stayed on. Of course it did. I've been on the trail of the Magical Amulet of Kroz for three years, following cryptic hints left by that rascal Scott Miller, founder of Apogee Software. Miller claimed the amulet grants true wisdom, but all it seems to grant so far is a nasty habit of running into monsters resembling umlaut-crowned vowels and h...

It was November 25th, 1985. The air was already biting, the kind that promised a long, hard winter, like a whisper from a tomb that still had plenty of residents. Most folks were probably still bloated from Thanksgiving turkey, watching football or trying to figure out if that Cabbage Patch Doll they'd promised little Timmy actually existed, or if it was just a fever dream spun by Madison Avenue. The world, as it often does, was clanking along, oblivious. But in the dim, hallowed halls where true sound resided, something had just crawled out of the dark. Something beautiful and unsettling. I'm talking about Dead Can Dance's Spleen and Ideal . Now, if you were a kid at the time, scraping by on whatever hair metal or synth-pop dribbled out of the radio, this record probably wasn't on your radar. It wasn't designed for radars. It was designed for mausoleums. For ancient, crumbling cathedrals where the stained glass was long gone, letting in only a bruised, purple light...

You ever smell a Texas Instruments TI-99/4A when it’s been running too long? That hot-plastic, cheap-capacitor stink that sneaks out of the vents like robots dying behind the walls. During the Christmas season of 1980, that odor hung over half the dens in America, because something had just woken up inside those beige coffins. Something hungry. Something that had been sleeping since the caves of mainframes past. They called it Hunt the Wumpus . A different kind of darkness was stirring. A primal one. A necessary one. The Wumpus was loose, and it wanted a piece of your soul, or at least a few hours of your time. Texas Instruments, bless their cold, calculating hearts, decided to bring the horror home. The original game, a text-based thing made of words and imagination, had been kicking around on big, clunky university computers since '73. It was pure dread, conjured in the mind. But this, this new beast on the TI-99/4A computer, it had pictures. It had color. It had sound. And in th...

Let me tell you something, 1985 was a fantastic year, one of the best years, maybe ever. We had Wham!, we had Back to the Future, and then, BOOM, the single greatest thing to ever happen to the frozen-food aisle: Hot Pockets . I’m talking real American genius here. Two brothers, smart guys, very smart, they came up with this idea: What if you could take a sandwich, make it a thousand times better, stuff it with cheese that’s hotter than the sun, wrap it in a beautiful golden crust, and cook it in two minutes? Two minutes! That’s faster than some people can tie their shoes. The brothers' company, Chef America - great name, very patriotic - launched it nationwide in ’85, and the people went wild. They’ve got pepperoni! They’ve got cheesesteak! They've got ham & cheese! All of the greatest flavors! You open the box, you see that silver sleeve, that crisping sleeve, very high-tech, very advanced for the time, you put it in the microwave, DING, and suddenly you’ve got lava-hot d...

One of the greatest moments of the 1980s came to pass on a Sunday, November 22, 1987. It was the kind of evening where the wind off Lake Michigan could slice right through you, promising a bitter winter. Inside, folks were tucked in, probably nursing a last cup of coffee or a beer, watching the flickering blue light of the television. Television, you see, is a comfort. A numbing hum. It tells you stories you expect, sells you things you don’t need, and keeps the darkness at bay. A familiar voice telling you the news or a beloved alien doctor battling some rubber-suited menace. It's a guardian, a promise of order in a chaotic world. That night, the promise broke. Channel 9, WGN, was running its nine o’clock news. Then the picture stuttered. Just a hiccup. Snow for half a heartbeat. You’ve seen that a thousand times, right? Bad antenna, Russian satellite, whatever. You reach for the vertical hold. But this time, the picture didn’t come back right. It came back wrong. A face filled th...

It was November 1989, a time when the Berlin Wall was doing its level best to become a rather fetching pile of souvenirs, George Bush the Elder was discovering that being President is marginally less fun than reading the fine print on a nuclear disarmament treaty, and the Commodore 64, that beige breadbin of dreams, was quietly preparing to traumatize an entire generation of Westerners who thought “Survival Horror” was something that happened to other people in Japanese games they couldn’t afford to import. Somewhere, in the bustling, slightly seedy underbelly of the computer gaming industry, a little company called Dynamix decided it was time to unleash something truly...unsettling upon the unsuspecting Commodore 64-owning populace. They called it Project Firestart . And oh, the sheer, unadulterated hubris of such a title. A "project," as if it were a particularly ambitious attempt at knitting a scarf for a very large, many-necked alien. "Firestart," which sounds l...

I sing of arms and the man…no, wrong epic. I sing of cursors and the Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, who suddenly found himself clutching a plastic rodent, and staring into the glowing rectangle that promised to civilize him.  It was forty years ago today that Microsoft loosed upon an unsuspecting world something called Windows 1.0 . Not an operating system, mind you. Heavens no. That would come later, when the accountants and the lawyers had properly sanctified the theft. This was merely an "operating environment," atop the squat, utilitarian MS-DOS operating system. No longer would the American office worker be forced to endure the brutal, East German austerity of one full-screen program at a time. No! Now he could run a spreadsheet and a word processor simultaneously, watching them slide over one another, in a phenomenon known as "overlapping windows." And a new interfacing device, the mouse, would replace typing and keyboards with another innovation: "point a...

"Sabrina dies at dawn!" It's scary enough wandering through the primeval woods of Transylvania in the dead of night, but then you come across a wrinkled piece of paper on the forest floor upon which these words are written. The date must surely be November of 1982, and the horror unfolding before you is courtesy of Penguin Software's chilling graphic adventure, Transylvania. Facing all that goes bump in the night in this land of superstition and morbid enchantment, you must rescue the Princess Sabrina, who is currently being held prisoner in a sealed coffin in the tower of Dracula's castle. Would you dare descend into the darkened cellar of a house bearing the uber-lucky number 13? Sure, there was a hearty loaf of white bread on the first floor, and a flintlock pistol. But the latter could use a silver bullet, as you're being doggedly pursued by a demon-eyed werewolf. Too bad that you'll have to retrieve the projectile from the inside of a coffin occupied ...

What is it about those cheap cardboard and plastic glasses that can supercharge a mere movie sequel into a phenomenon for the ages? Yes, my friend, I'm talking about those 3-D glasses. Not the fancy ones of today that you have to drop in a box after the movie. I'm talking about the real deal, the OG, with the blue lens and the red lens. Every couple of decades, Hollywood gets a bad case of global amnesia that it can make 3-D movies, and then reintroduces the fad anew. So it did in 80s, and that time around, it was the third installment of a film franchise that would be gifted the three-dimensional treatment. The schlock 3-D trifecta was begun by Friday the 13th Part III and Jaws 3-D, and completed on November 18, 1983, with the release of Amityville 3-D. The house was back, the windows were eyes again, and this time the tagline screamed, "Warning: In this movie, you are the victim." An all-too-knowing professor in the movie says, "The only thing remotely inter...

November 17th, 1989. A Friday. The air had that bite to it, the kind that makes you pull your collar tight and wonder what the dark has in store. Maybe it was just the fall weather, or maybe, just maybe, it was the arrival of Wrath of the Black Manta on the Nintendo Entertainment System. "Wrath of the Black Manta." Sounds like the title of a cheap paperback you’d find in a supermarket magazine aisle, doesn't it? A dime-store thriller. But there it was, sitting on the shelves of toy stores and Blockbusters all across America, wrapped in pristine cellophane or a dirty plastic rental case, promising a tale of ninjas and crime lords and a world gone mad. A world where the bad guys wore ski masks and the hero, the Black Manta himself, was just a name whispered in the alleyways. You slip that grey cartridge into the slot, press it down with a satisfying chunk. The machine hums. The screen flares to life. And then you’re in. You’re not in your comfortable living room anymore; y...

It is a little-known fact, buried somewhere between the invention of the cassette tape and the controversial decision to put pineapple on pizza, that on the sixteenth of November in the year 1984, the human race was quietly issued a cinematic memo informing it that, in the event of a comet passing perilously close to Earth and turning ninety-nine point nine-nine-nine percent of the population into either dust or zombies, the last remnants of civilization would be two Valley Girl sisters and a trucker. The film in question was Night of the Comet , written and directed by Thom Eberhardt. It is nothing less than one of the quintessential 80s films, one that future generations and offworld guests will be shown, should they express a curiosity to truly understand what life was like in the 1980s. It shares cinematic DNA with The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension - which opened earlier the same year - but presents a far more cinéma vérité approach in its depiction of the...

Pull up a chair by the fire, because we're not talking about some gentle strumming of a folksy tune today. Oh no. We're diving headfirst into something that snarled and howled its way out of the darkness, a beast unleashed on November 15, 1983. The album Bark at the Moon , by Ozzy Osbourne. And I'm not afraid to make the controversial statement that this record featured the strongest songwriting from start to finish of any of the Black Sabbath frontman's solo efforts. It's hard to comprehend the pressure Ozzy was under in the creation of his third studio album. He and his fans were still shaken by the senseless death of guitarist Randy Rhoads, whose monster riffs and melodic leads had been a major driver in establishing Ozzy as a solo act, quickly banishing the clouds of the Sabbath legacy from overshadowing his fresh new sonic direction.  The loss of Rhoads changed Ozzy forever in ways that were very obvious. He seemed to age a decade or more overnight, his gait on...

Los Angeles - November 14, 1983: Twenty-three hand-picked souls have been summoned to the Crest Theater on Westwood Boulevard, a modest little palace usually reserved for sneak previews of pictures nobody will remember by breakfast. Tonight, though, the marquee is dark. No title. No stars. Just a velvet rope, two security men built like Michelin Men in Brioni, and the low throb of anticipation that feels like the bass line to something unholy. Inside, the chosen glide down the aisle in a hush that is almost ecclesiastical: Fred Astaire in a navy blazer sharp enough to shave with, looking like a man who has seen the future and is mildly amused; Jane Fonda, fresh from a workout that cost more than most people’s rent, her cheekbones still humming from the Nautilus; Diana Ross in silver lamé that catches the projector beam and throws it back like a disco ball in heaven; Eddie Murphy, twenty-two years old and already owning the room simply by refusing to sit still; Marlon Brando, mountainou...

This scrivener, having voyaged through countless dungeons and chronicled myriad heroic deeds, now turns his discerning gaze to a noteworthy event of November in the Year of our Lord 1986. For it was in that month, through the wondrous conduits of silicon and phosphor, that a grand saga made its perilous transition to the ubiquitous Commodore 64—a testament to its enduring power and allure: The Bard's Tale. Verily, a robust electronic contrivance, this "C64," though humble in its plastic casing, did prove itself a most potent arcane artifact. And in '86, it was graced by a creation most deserving of a bard's epic verse. Imagine, if you will, the mist-shrouded city of Skara Brae, gripped in the icy clutches of eternal winter by the vile archmage Mangar the Dark. Monsters prowling the fog-choked streets, taverns echoing with desperate pleas, and only your band of valiant heroes—up to six stout souls, plus perchance a summoned ally—stands betwixt the realm and utter ...

You just had to be there. That's the only lens one can sometimes use to fully comprehend a major event in the past. Sure, it's notable that the first television set was manufactured on a particular date, when you sit in a room with one today that receives thousands of channels. But what was the dawn of television like if you'd never seen a moving picture in your own home before? That's the lens through which one must view the arrival of the Stern arcade machine Berzerk on November 12, 1980. America had seen Space Invaders. It had been devoured by Asteroids. But Berzerk brought sci-fi horror into a more intimate space. Instead of shooting at aliens at a distance from the relative safety of your base or starship, you were in what Lin Manuel Miranda might call "the room where where it happens." Your "humanoid," with the physique of Christopher Lee and the gait of Joe Biden after five espressos, runs and laser guns his way through rooms filled with kill...

Some knockoffs just don't know when to quit. November 11, 1988, provided just such a case in point, with the release of a second Iron Eagle movie, the inventively titled Iron Eagle II . The poor man's Top Gun got a sequel thirty-six years before 80s icons Maverick and Iceman. Que pantalones! Iron Eagle II tries to up the stakes by forcing American and Soviet fighter pilots onto a secret team, led by the returning Lou Gossett, Jr. The team is deployed to Israel for a covert mission to take out a nuclear weapons compound in an unnamed Middle Eastern country. It sounds like a fever dream Nick Fuentes would have after eating too many Portillo's hot dogs late at night. Speaking of hot dogs, the aerial manuevers seen in the film were performed by actual Israeli Air Force pilots, and were the one redeeming aspect of the film cited by film critics who otherwise blasted the flick. Top Gun was known for its bazillion-selling soundtrack, a groundbreaking disc that established a new t...

Out in the sun-baked cauldron of the Orange Bowl, where the palms sway like mocking sentinels and the air hangs heavy with the salt of defeat, a miracle unfolded on the fateful day of November 10, 1984. It was the kind of tale that old football gods might whisper over tankards of nectar, a saga of grit and glory that turned the University of Maryland's Terrapins from whipped curs into crowned lions. Frank Reich , the unheralded quarterback with the steady arm of a blacksmith, led his band of Old Liners on a charge that shook the pillars of the defending national champions, the Miami Hurricanes, and etched his name in the eternal ledger of gridiron legend. For in the second half, with the scoreboard mocking them at 31-0, the Terps didn't just claw back—they stormed the heavens and claimed the throne, 42-40. The first half had witnessed the Hurricanes leave nothing in their wake but wreckage and despair. For the Terrapins of Maryland, hope was but a flickering ember, nigh extingu...