80s News Today

On the eve of 1985—December 31, 1984, to be precise—the guardians of law and order across this great land of the free were clutching their mimeographed bulletins like talismans against the darkness, warning of impending "occult activity" and "blood rituals" beneath the turning of the calendar. Police departments, those bastions of pragmatic authority, circulated dire memos about gatherings in remote woods, animal mutilations, and the ever-popular human sacrifice, all supposedly timed to the infernal clock of some fabricated Satanic calendar. New Year's Eve, they claimed, was a night of "revels," "blood rites," and high witchcraft—perfect for luring the unsuspecting into the flames. The bulletins started quiet, a murmur in the police scanner's static, then louder, typed out on cheap paper in police stations from Des Moines to Eureka, tacked up next to lost dog posters. Beware, they whispered. Beware of unusual activity. Beware of gathering...

Pull up a seat by the crackling fire, because we're gonna talk about a scream in the dark of winter. A rumble of thunder from a place where the shadows stretch long and the old gods still hold sway. December. Nineteen-eighty. A time when the world was shivering on the cusp of a new, louder, more demonic sound. Somewhere in that gloom, a band called Angel Witch unleashed their eponymous debut, a slab of vinyl with a cover that looked like a fever dream from a Sunday School teacher’s worst nightmare. This was the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, and Angel Witch, well, they were like the strange, pale kid in class who drew demons in his notebook – unsettling, fascinating, and utterly unforgettable. They had a raw, occult energy that made Black Sabbath look like a church choir and Iron Maiden look like they were still practicing their scales. From the moment the needle dropped, or the tape started to hiss, you knew this wasn't going to be a walk in the park. A horned demon leering...

The Christmas air was sharp with the scent of pine and impending snow, a false promise of peace. Kids everywhere were unwrapping their Nintendo Entertainment Systems, eager for another dose of cheerful Italian plumbers or brave elven heroes. But for some, for the unsuspecting few who dared to venture into the digital darkness released that month, something altogether different awaited. It was a season for huddling close to the woodstove, but for a certain kind of person—the kind who doesn't mind a little darkness with their cocoa—it was the season of the Castle. I remember that winter like it was yesterday. December 1989. The snow was falling thick outside my window, piling up against the panes like it wanted to get in, to smother the light. Christmas lights blinked lazily on the neighbors' houses, but inside, the world felt colder, darker. And then there was this game. Shadowgate . It showed up on the Nintendo Entertainment System right around then, slipping into stores just a...

Good heavens. December in the U.K. A time for mince pies, questionable knitwear, and the perennial British tradition of watching ghost stories and The Great Escape on the BBC. But in December 1980, something rather less traditional decided to drop in on the proceedings. Not a forgotten Christmas present, you understand, but a rather large, presumably confused, and altogether unidentifiable flying object. The setting, naturally, was Rendlesham Forest in Suffolk. Because where else would a genuinely baffling extraterrestrial encounter take place but in a rather damp, entirely unremarkable patch of woodland adjacent to two highly secret NATO airbases? It's like finding a sentient trug in your garden shed; utterly illogical, yet somehow, perfectly British. Chapter 1: The Torchlight Tour of Utter Bewilderment The whole thing kicked off, as these things often do, with a peculiar light. Not a car headlight, nor the distant glint of a particularly enthusiastic disco ball, but something......

There it was, in the dim, flickering neon haze of the American arcade in that fateful winter of 1988—December, to be precise—when the coin-op palaces still pulsed like the heart of the republic's youth culture, those cavernous temples of beeping salvation where the teenagers of the Reagan era gathered to escape the banalities of suburban life and plunge quarters into the maw of electronic ecstasy. And suddenly, BOOM!, exploding onto the scene like a rocket launcher in a crack den, came an arcade machine as addictive as crack but cheaper to use: NARC , from Williams Electronics. The wizard behind this cartel-busting curtain? None other than Eugene Jarvis, the maestro behind Defender and Robotron, now turning his genius to the hottest mania of the moment: the War on Drugs. Picture it, if you will: the cabinet itself, a towering monolith of black and blood-red, emblazoned with the slogan, "Say no to drugs!" Inside, digitized graphics—real photographs turned sprites, a techno...

Christmas morning 1989 brought the box. You know the one. It had that heavy, high-gloss cardboard feel, featuring a whip-cracking hero who looked like he’d stepped off a paperback cover by Frazetta. Picture this: The living room is a battlefield of torn wrapping paper and discarded ribbons. Under the tree, nestled among the socks and sweaters, sits this little gray brick of a console, the Game Boy, with its monochrome screen glowing like a cursed artifact unearthed from some forgotten crypt. And inside it? The Castlevania Adventure , a game where you play as Christopher Belmont, a whip-wielding hero battling through Dracula's domain. No more were you tethered to the TV in the den, waiting for your turn while Dad hogged the remote. This was freedom, dark and delicious, packed into a cartridge smaller than a pack of smokes. But the real magic—or should I say, the real curse—came when the family piled into the station wagon for the obligatory trek to Grandmother's house. Over the ...

'Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the land, children were tucked in their beds, but they didn't understand. Their sugar plum dreams of E.T. games would be dashed, by Sunnyvale fiends out to grab parents' cash. Santa's sleigh was loaded down with 2.6 million E.T. the Extraterrestrial cartridges for the Atari 2600 as it taxied onto the runway at the North Pole. Those silver boxes were the last thing kids saw in their minds before falling asleep, and the first thing they would search for under the tree by morn. But no one could have imagined the best movie of the year would become one of the worst games of all time. There's nothing unusual about a movie-licensed game being a disappointment. Some of the greatest films of all time - Back to the Future, Total Recall, Mad Max , and even Star Wars - have been turned into bum games. But E.T. joined the 2600's Raiders of the Lost Ark cartridge in a special circle of Hell, reserved for games that are not...

December 23, 1988. On this most peculiar of pre-festive evening, Hollywood, in its infinite perversion, decided to present America with a cinematic gift. A gift unwrapped not with a joyous tear, but with a visceral shriek: Hellbound: Hellraiser II . Now, one might reasonably inquire, why? Why, when the spirit of the season was ostensibly about peace on Earth and goodwill toward men (and perhaps a mildly intoxicating eggnog), would anyone choose to delve into the exquisitely tormented psyche of Cenobites, those interdimensional arbiters of pain and pleasure? The answer, I suspect, lies somewhere between the inscrutable whims of movie executives and a collective, subconscious urge to verify if indeed, there could be anything worse than arguing with Aunt Buffy over the last slice of fruitcake. The original Hellraiser , you see, had been a delightful little piece of visceral philosophy, posing the rather pertinent question: "What if the ultimate S&M party required a particularly i...

My dear readers, let us cast our minds back, if you will, to that frigid Saturday in December, the twenty-second of the month, 1984. The very air of Manhattan, crisp and brittle as a dried leaf, crackled with that peculiar, electric tension—a subterranean thrum, really—that only a city teetering on the precipice of its own magnificent chaos can truly generate. Ah, New York! A symphony of grime and glitter, a dazzling, dangerous carnival where every denizen, from the haughty Beekman Place dowager to the denizen of the deepest, graffiti-scarred subway car, played their part in the grand, cacophonous opera of urban life. On this particular day, our stage was set in the very bowels of Gotham, a downtown No. 2 express rumbling south, rattling its way from Fourteenth Street to Chambers. And who, pray tell, was our unlikely protagonist? Not some gilded titan of Wall Street, nor a strutting denizen of Studio 54, but a small, bespectacled engineer, a man of modest means and—it would soon become...

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the late 1980s video game industry lies a small, underestimated company called Jaleco, which decided to release a game on the Nintendo Entertainment System entitled The Lord of King —known in the Western world as Astyanax . This event occurred on December 21, 1989, a date which, had it been chosen for any logical reason, might have commemorated the winter solstice or the invention of something useful, but was instead dedicated to launching a side-scrolling platformer into the unsuspecting homes of gamers. Now, the plot of this game is one of those affairs that makes one wonder if the writers had been indulging in too much fermented sake, or perhaps reading one too many fairy tales backwards. Our hero is a perfectly ordinary sixteen-year-old schoolboy named Astyanax (a name which, in the annals of parental cruelty, ranks somewhere between "Sue" for a boy and naming your child after a minor Trojan War footnote). One fine day, while trudgin...

It was a Monday, and rather an unremarkable one beyond the icy temperature. However, on an island nation in the Pacific Ocean known as Japan, a small electronic box was preparing to do something quite remarkable. This box, affectionately known as the Sega Master System, was about to unleash a universe. And not just any universe, but one teeming with three planets, advanced technology, ancient evils, and a protagonist who, astonishingly, wasn’t a barbarian with a rather oversized sword and a penchant for shouting. Yes, on December 20, 1987 , a small cartridge containing the digital essence of Phantasy Star was released. Sega, in an act of staggering spatial efficiency, managed to cram three entire planets—Palma, Motavia, and Dezoris—into a four-megabit cartridge. This was, at the time, considered an achievement of such monumental proportions that it briefly made the invention of sliced bread look like a minor clerical error. The story begins in a way that most things do—with a cert...

December 19, 1986. In the mall cineplex, the air was thick with the smell of butter-drenched popcorn and the looming dread of the Reagan era’s shiny, plastic patriotism. Then the lights died, the screen flickered to life, and suddenly we weren't in a cinema anymore. We were in the Green Inferno. We were in the mud. We were in the absolute, gibbering madness of Vietnam. Oliver Stone—a man who actually crawled through the tall grass with a rifle in his hand and the smell of cordite in his lungs—decided to drop a napalm canister right on the doorstep of the American Dream. He gave us Platoon . This wasn't Top Gun . There were no gleaming white teeth or volleyball montages here. No, man. This was a high-octane descent into the soul of a generation that got chewed up and spat out by the military-industrial complex. It was a war between two fathers: Barnes, the scarred, psychotic god of death, and Elias, the pot-smoking, Christ-like ghost of a conscience that never had a chance. Char...

Let us now journey back, not to the gilded towers of Manhattan, nor to the sun-baked cliffs of the West Coast, but to the neon-drenched, pixelated cosmos of a late-1980s American living room. The year, if you please, is nineteen hundred and eighty-seven, and the day, a brisk, pre-Christmas Eighteenth of December. A date, mind you, that was already etched in the digital firmament by the simultaneous arrival of two titans: the labyrinthine saga of Final Fantasy and  - just 24 hours earlier - the relentless, blue-clad robot hero of Mega Man.  But ah, amidst this glittering firmament of nascent legends, a more ruddy star, if you will, blazed into existence. Not from the pristine laboratories of Nintendo’s Kyoto, nor the sun-dappled campuses of Capcom, but from the slightly more gritty precincts of Data East. And his name, my dear friends, was Karnov . Billed by many as a "Russian strongman," the arrival of Karnov in arcades and home consoles might have been seen as a last gasp at...

Ahhhhh...December 17, 1987! Picture it: Osaka, the humming heart of Japan's electronic empire, where salarymen in crisp suits dash through rain-slicked streets under the blaze of pachinko parlors and towering kanji signs...VAROOOM! And there, in the backrooms of Capcom—a scrappy outfit still shaking off the arcade dust— a small band of young Turks, fresh-faced dreamers led by the visionary Keiji Inafune, unleashes upon the Nintendo Famicom and NES a cartridge that will... KAPOW!...redefine the very pulse of home gaming. Mega Man ! He wasn’t just a character; he was a Philosophy in 8-bit phosphor. He was the Blue Bomber, a cobalt-clad cherub with a plasma cannon for an arm and a look of wide-eyed, Vacant-But-Determined resolve. But oh, the audacity of it! The sheer, unadulterated hubris of the designers! They didn’t just give you a linear path—a simple A-to-B trudge like those plumber-worshipping masses were used to. No! They gave you Selection. They gave you the Power of Choice. Si...

There’s a kind of terrible, heavy silence in old places, isn’t there? A waiting. You can feel it in the foundations of an ancient house, or maybe down in the root cellar, where the air hangs thick and cold, smelling of damp earth and things that should stay buried. It’s the silence of history holding its breath. The movie they called The Keep , which sneaked into theaters on a blustery Friday back in '83, December 16th to be precise, understood that feeling in its bones, even if the folks in Hollywood—those well-meaning idiots in the cheap suits—didn't quite know what to do with the beast they'd bought. Folks bundled up against the cold, shuffled in with their popcorn and sodas, expecting maybe another war picture or a straightforward scare. What they got was something else entirely. Something that burrowed under the skin and stayed there. The story starts simple enough, the way the best nightmares do. A detachment of German soldiers, weary from the endless grind of war, ro...

ZAP! POW! BAM! There it was, on that crisp Thursday evening in the winter of '83, flickering into America's living rooms like a bolt from the digital blue yonder: Automan , premiering on ABC at eight o'clock sharp, December 15th, to be precise. And what a spectacle it was!  Picture this: the nation still buzzing from the neon trance of Tron the year before—that Disney dazzler where Jeff Bridges got sucked into the grid and came out glowing like a circuit board on fire—and here comes Glen A. Larson, that prolific wizard of television schlock and sparkle (the man behind Knight Rider, no less, with its talking Trans Am prowling the highways), unleashing his latest confection: a holographic superhero, birthed not from some mythic lab accident or radioactive spider, but from the humming bowels of a police department computer. Walter Nebicher—played by Desi Arnaz Jr., that scion of the Ricardo dynasty, looking every bit the awkward genius in his rumpled shirts and earnest glare...

It's epic! It's divisive! It's controversial! And it's also the definitive and superior film adaptation of the novel Dune by Frank Herbert. Yes, I'm talking about David Lynch's Dune , which opened in theaters on December 14, 1984. The later reboots simply don't hold a glowglobe to Lynch's lavish treatment of one of the greatest works in Western literature. You see, Dune is the rare genre novel that achieves escape velocity from the mere science fiction orbit to legitimate comparison with Great Expectations or The Great Gatsby . A true desert island book, it can be reread endlessly. And not simply because Herbert creates a universe the reader is sucked into, but because his writing is so damn good. I will occasionally pick up my copy - a mass market paperback released with the 1984 flick - and, some time later, regain consciousness to realize I'm already 100 pages into the story once again. It's that good. So, theoretically, I should be one of t...

In the cold grip of winter, on the thirteenth day of the twelfth moon in the year we mortals reckon as 1984, a new power stirred in the realm of Fairyland—no, not in the ancient lands of song and saga, but in the flickering glow of the NEC PC-8801, that strange artifact of the Rising Sun's ingenuity. It was there, in the hidden workshops of T&E Soft, that Tokihiro Naito, a young visionary not unlike a wizard forging spells from forbidden tomes, unleashed Hydlide upon an unsuspecting world. It was a quiet beginning, a single seed planted in the fertile ground of Japanese computing. Yet from this humble release date of December 13, 1984, a legacy grew, one that would eventually cross the Vast Sea to foreign shores. A million copies were sold, a testament to the hunger for new tales of heroism. One day, the tales of Hydlide would be told in the West, on the Nintendo Entertainment System and Sega Saturn. But before this could come to pass, a hero had to emerge in Fairyland during ...

The world is a stage for the exceptional, a battleground where the strong thrive and the weak wallow in their self-imposed mediocrity. On December 12, 1981, a new clarion call echoed for those with the ears to hear, a raw, unpolished testament to carnal instinct and aggressive self-preservation: Welcome to Hell by the triumvirate known as Venom . Cronos, Mantas, and Abaddon—three northern English barbarians who looked as though they had clawed their way out of a Hieronymus Bosch canvas—did not “dabble” in Satanism. They WERE Satanism made flesh, leather, and decibels. And their audio recruitment office was opening on turntables and boomboxes worldwide. “Welcome to hell,” Cronos snarls across the title track, and one does not merely hear the words; one is dragged by the hair through the gates. The production is gloriously primitive—drums like gunshots in a sewer, guitars like chainsaws carving pentagrams into cathedral doors, bass an Inner Earth pile-driver throbbing 3,959 miles down. ...

Cast your gaze back to a most improbable day, December the 11th, 1986, a date which, according to the vast and frequently contradictory archives of video game history, marked the arrival of something quite extraordinary on the Japanese Nintendo Famicom. While the rest of the world was likely grappling with the existential dread of waiting five minutes for a dial-up modem to connect, the discerning gamers of Japan were being offered a slice of pure, unadulterated, pixelated deduction. The game was titled Sherlock Holmes: Hakushaku Reijō Yūkai Jiken . Which, for those of you not intimately familiar with the phonetic nuances of the Japanese language and the dramatic flair of Victorian crime, translates roughly to "Sherlock Holmes: The Abduction of Miss Earl." Or Countess. Or something equally aristocratic and prone to being kidnapped, as these things often are. The core gameplay involved fisticuffs, Yngwie Malmsteenesque high leg kicks, and the painstaking gathering of non-sequi...

Human beings are different. They care about timing. In December, they care especially about presents, overcooked turkey, and the curious phenomenon of a jolly, red-suited man defying several fundamental laws of physics. And so, somewhere between worrying about Aunt Enid’s pudding and the precise location of the batteries for a talking doll, a software house known as Activision decided the time was now. Knightmare arrived for the Commodore 64, not with the fiery majesty of a collapsing sun, but with a quiet, plastic rustle. Now, for those unfamiliar with the labyrinthine joys of British television in the late eighties, Knightmare was not just a game. Oh no. It was, in its original televised form, an experience. A glorious, utterly bonkers spectacle involving a blindfolded child, a giant, talking disembodied head, and a series of dungeon rooms that looked suspiciously like someone's garage after a particularly ambitious theatrical clear-out. The goal? To guide the blindfolded child...