80s News Today

The wind outside your window tonight—that thin, whistling scream that sounds like a ghost looking for a door handle—isn’t nearly as cold as the wind I remember from February 12, 1982. That was the day Atari let the shadows out of the box. They called it Haunted House , a simple little cartridge for the Atari 2600. But for those of us sitting on shag carpets in the dim glow of a Zenith tube TV, it was something else entirely. It was a gateway drug to survival horror gaming. Picture this: You're not some muscle-bound hero with a shotgun or a chainsaw (we'll leave that up to Namco's legendary Splatterhouse ). No, you're just a pair of wide, glowing eyes—vulnerable, anonymous, like any one of us stumbling into the wrong house on a stormy night (it happens, folks). Graves Manor, they called it, after old Zachary Graves, whose ghost still rattles around those pixelated halls. Is he related to the distinguished M.T. Graves of TV schlock horror fame? The slim game manual failed...

The Beverly Center mall opened its doors on February 4, 1982, and Los Angeles, that great chrome-plated dream factory, paused for a moment—only a moment—to witness the arrival of something new, something monumentally, unapologetically itself. Here was the future, or at least a version of it that cost $100 million and rose eight stories high on the old site of kiddie rides and cotton candy, where once the Ferris wheel spun lazy circles above Beverly Park and now the parking structure itself became the plinth for retail nirvana. Picture it: the intersection of La Cienega and Beverly Boulevard, that throbbing artery where the traffic never quite stops and the billboards scream in primary colors. Developers A. Alfred Taubman, Sheldon Gordon, and E. Phillip Lyon had taken the triangular plot—8.8 acres of former pony rides and mini-roller-coasters—and piled upon it a brown monolith, a great angular box wrapped in glass escalators that climbed like transparent veins toward the Hollywood Hill...

There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the British Broadcasting Corporation is for and why it exists, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened, and it resulted in a television program called The Computer Programme . On a cold Monday in January 1982—specifically the 11th, a day generally reserved for the nursing of mild hangovers and the profound realization that winter is quite long—the British public was introduced to a machine that looked like a very expensive, very sophisticated biscuit tin. This was the BBC Micro. The first episode of The Computer Programme featured Chris Serle, a man who possessed the heroic level of bewilderment required to represent an entire nation that still thought "software" was a type of comfortable knitwear. Alongside him was Ian McNaught-Davis, who explained the digital revolution with the kin...

Ah, Las Vegas in January...the neon still humming from New Year's hangovers, the slot machines clinking like nervous teeth, the desert wind whipping through the convention center parking lot where the big rigs unload their cargo of tomorrow's gadgets. And there, amid the polyester suits and the badge-lanyards swinging like pendulums of ambition, at the Winter Consumer Electronics Show, something electric was about to happen. Not just electric—zap! pow!—the kind of jolt that rewires the brain of an entire industry. Enter Jack Tramiel. Picture him: the Holocaust survivor turned typewriter king turned calculator warrior, now the emperor of Commodore International, striding the show floor with that Eastern European intensity, eyes like laser beams scanning for weakness in the competition. Tramiel, the man who once nearly went bankrupt battling Texas Instruments in the calculator wars and vowed revenge—"business is war," he liked to say—had been plotting this moment for mo...

Something rather extraordinary happened at the start of January 1982. Sega, a company primarily concerned with making electronic amusements, unleashed upon an unsuspecting world a game called Zaxxon . The name, one suspects, was derived from "axonometric projection," a term from the field of technical drawing which sounds impressively scientific but essentially means "drawing things at an angle so they look a bit three-dimensional." This was, at the time, considered terribly clever. Prior to Zaxxon, arcade games had been content with two dimensions: left, right, up, down, and the occasional jump. Space Invaders marched stoically downward; Pac-Man navigated a flat maze; Defender scrolled horizontally with the enthusiasm of a bored librarian. But Zaxxon, in a fit of what can only be described as graphical overachievement, decided that diagonal would be far more interesting. The result was an isometric view—a sort of three-quarters perspective that gave the illusion of...

ZAP! POW! BAM! There it was, midnight Eastern Time, January 1, 1982—KABOOM!—the stroke of the new year, and out of the hazy ether of cable television's wild frontier, a new beast roared into the living rooms of America: CNN2. Not just another channel, no sir, but a whirling dervish of news. A non-stop, thirty-minute wheel of headlines spinning round and round the clock like a meth hamster on a neon hamster wheel. Ted Turner, that mouth-of-the-South yachtsman-turned-mogul, with his drawl thick as Georgia peat and his eyes gleaming like a pirate spotting treasure on the horizon, had done it again. Fresh off birthing CNN in 1980—that upstart 24-hour news monster that had the Big Three networks (ABC, CBS, NBC) clutching their pearls and muttering about "chicken noodle news"—here he was, flinging another grenade into the complacent parlors of American television. This was a twenty-four-hour news ticker for the mind, a relentless, glittering carousel of bite-sized information, ...

'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...

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...

"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 ...

It was November 1982 when a kid walked into the 7-Eleven in Aspen Hill, Maryland, and one of the greatest comic book issues of all time was just sitting there on the spinner rack: Arion: Lord of Atlantis #1, published by DC Comics. Now, there's no salesman or carnival barker in a comic book shop, much less a convenience store, to sell you on one title or another. The cover has to close the deal, and Arion #1 had one that could reach from the depths to reel in the pre-adolescent buyer hook, line, and sinker. Arion, Lord of Atlantis - that's enough right there, when you think about it...just the title alone captures the imagination of a child already enraptured with the legends and mysteries of that vanished civilization. But there he is, standing over a vanquished foe, crimson-lined midnight blue cape swirling around a superhero frame enrobed in intriguing Atlantean-by-way-of-the-Xavier-Institute garb, laser eyes burning with suggested god-like power, clenched fists glowing wit...

Atari makes watches these days, and that's phenomenal because it's time to consider the DeLorean of video game consoles, the impossibly sleek Atari 5200. Like Rocky Balboa in the first movie, Atari became the People's Champion with the Atari 2600, but took a merciless pounding and fell short of actual victory from a graphics and sound standpoint. When it came time for a sequel in 1982, the boys and girls in Sunnyvale were looking for Rocky II redemption. A little respect from their peers and the hardcore arcade denizens of the world. Alas, the stairs in Philadelphia seemed a lot taller than in the movies when Atari began its spirited ascent in November 1982. The 5200 entered the ring as the favorite in the match. Atari had the sales clout and the coveted arcade franchises. Now it was bringing in true arcade-quality graphics and sound. Spoiled brats who mocked the 2600's tablet-munching Pac-Man conversion in 1982 are still laughing about the game today. Why, even K.C. ...

Hear that wind? It’s not just the autumn gale rattling your windowpanes; no, that’s the demon breath of memory, stirring the dust from a time when pixels were chunky as a good homemade stew and a monochrome screen held more terrors than a technicolor nightmare. We’re talking about October 1982, a month like any other, sure, with leaves turning the color of old bloodstains and Halloween knocking on the door, hungry for sweets and frights. But something else was stirring that month, a digital chill creeping into homes across America, finding its way into the beating heart of a machine known as the TRS-80. And what was it, this digital ghost? It was a game. Not just any game, mind you, but a sliver of pure, unadulterated fear called Spook House . Released by those clever devils at Adventure International, a name that promised journeys into the unknown, and oh, did it deliver. Spook House was released as part of a double-feature with Toxic Dumpsite —two horrors for the price of one, a doub...

ZAP! POW! The year is 1982, and America’s still nursing its Vietnam hangover—those psychic scars, that national gut-punch, the war nobody wants to talk about but everybody’s still bleeding from. Out of this haze, this fog of guilt and grit, comes a film that doesn’t just walk into theaters but stalks them, silent and lethal, like a jungle cat with a chip on its shoulder. First Blood , released October 22, 1982, isn’t just a movie—it’s a cultural Claymore mine, detonating in the multiplexes, spraying shrapnel of raw nerve and primal rage. And at its center, a man, a myth, a walking wound: John Rambo, played by Sylvester Stallone, the Italian Stallion himself, now transformed into a one-man war machine, a Green Beret gone rogue, a ghost of ‘Nam who’s come home to haunt Small-Town, U.S.A. Oh, the zeitgeist! It hung heavy, thick as Marlboro Red smoke in a backroom poker game. We were still reeling, weren't we? The last helicopters had barely cleared the embassy roof in '75, but th...

It is a well-established fact that nothing ever truly begins. Things simply get to a point where they are slightly less not-happening than they were before. This is particularly true of rock and roll bands, which have a rather peculiar knack for coalescing into existence only to subsequently implode with all the predictable grace of a collapsing star, but with considerably more shouting and far less interesting physics. And so it was for The Smiths . On October 4, 1982, in a Manchester nightclub called The Ritz, a group of four life-forms, consisting of one Morrissey, one Johnny Marr, one Mike Joyce, and one Andy Rourke, decided that they would make a noise.  It was, by all accounts, a perfectly ordinary Monday evening in Manchester. The kind of evening that slouched casually into existence with all the understated enthusiasm of a damp dishcloth. Outside, the world was busying itself with the usual humdrum affairs: taxis navigated the perpetually bewildered geometry of city streets...

Bay Lake, Florida - October 1, 1982: It isn't a theme park, you understand. No, it's a prototype! A PROTOTYPE!!! That's the whole Big Idea, isn't it? That's the whole high-falutin' gambit, the whole, shimmering, fantastic notion of it all, that this is not some Mickey Mouse operation, not some tacky amusement park...it's EPCOT! EPCOT Center , the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, a name so grandiose it sounds like it was cooked up in a Pentagon war room or a Silicon Valley fever dream. But no! This is Walt Disney’s brainchild, or at least the ghost of it, rising from the ashes of his 1966 blueprints, now spun into a $1 billion extravaganza of glass domes, monorails, and utopian promises. EPCOT, nestled in the swampy, alligator-adjacent sprawl of Walt Disney World, is not so much a theme park as it is an idea—a bold, slightly-unhinged vision of a future where technology, optimism, and overpriced churros can coexist in harmony.  The gates swing ope...

September 30th, 1982. The day Bruce Springsteen walked out of the sunshine and into the deepest, darkest corner of the American night. Folks were expecting another Born to Run , another Darkness on the Edge of Town . Something with that big E Street sound. But that's not what we got. Not even close. We got a cassette. A cassette with a simple cover showing a black-and-white landscape that looked less like a picture and more like a faded memory. Or a bad omen. Before your Kmart cashier freed it from the anti-theft device, Nebraska was a set of four-track demos Springsteen recorded in January of that year at a house in Colts Neck, New Jersey, rough song sketches meant for the E Street Band to flesh out later. But when he listened back, he heard something else—songs that bled. Songs about folks on the edge—killers, cops, dreamers, and drifters, all caught in the gears of a machine that doesn’t care if they live or die. He decided to let ’em stand as they were, stark and unvarnished...

On September 26, 1982, the idea of a car that could think, could talk, felt like something torn from the pages of a sci-fi paperback you’d find in the spinner rack at the drugstore. But there it was, right in our living rooms. One of the most-essential, stylish, and definitive 1980s TV shows was about to premiere on NBC. And it wasn't Miami Vice . Kids across America were sprawled on the shag carpet, adults reclined in their La-Z-Boys, bowls of sour cream and onion potato chips forgotten as the screen lit up. The opening notes of that synth-heavy theme hit like a warning bell, a sound that promised adventure but carried an undercurrent of something darker, something unknowable. The words... Knight Rider ...in that distinctive font. And then there’s Michael Knight—David Hasselhoff, all jawline and swagger, a man who’s been given a second chance at life by a shadowy organization for the Reagan era called FLAG. He’s a loner, a drifter, a knight errant in blue jeans - but he’s not alon...

Forty years ago, a different America was emerging, though many refused to see it. It was the America that Billy Joel captured with stark precision on his album, The Nylon Curtain , released on this very day in 1982. Joel, the piano man from Hicksville, delivered a powerful and unapologetic album that spoke to the silent majority's fears, disillusionment, and quiet patriotism. This was Ronald Reagan's America. The Cold War was back on, and we were "winning." Yet in the heartland, the factories were closing, and the promises made to the children of the Greatest Generation were being broken. Joel raised the nylon curtain on the dark underside of the 80s, where in the darkness of decomissioned coal mines and blast furnaces, it was anything but "morning in America." Billy Joel wasn't singing about champagne and limousines; he was singing about the factory worker in "Allentown" waiting for a Pennsylvania he'd been promised, but that never arrived...

ZAP! POW! WHAM! On this fine morning of September 15, 1982, the newsstands of America shuddered under the weight of a new beast, a Technicolor dream machine called USA Today , bursting forth like a firework blast against a gray flannel sky. A nation of movers and shakers, of transient souls in Holiday Inn suites and airport lounges, finally got its own paper, a paper of the HOTELS, the AIRPORTS and the INTERSTATES! A paper for THEM! The ones who didn’t have time to slog through the leaden, beige columns of the Gray Lady. The ones who wanted their news like their Big Macs, FAST and HOT! Forget the monocolor, the staid, the ponderous pronouncements of the Old Guard dailies, those venerable, ink-stained monuments to textual heft. This, this thing – this USA Today – it was different. It practically shouted its difference, not with stentorian tones but with a vibrant, audacious burst of COLOR! The cognoscenti, the old-guard newspaper boys from The Washington Post and The New York Times , t...

A good book serves as a vacation, a portal to another world. But what do you do when you are already on vacation and the weather turns? The sky over Ocean City, Maryland, in August 1982, is a bruised purple, the color of a bad cut. You can feel the storm coming, a low thrumming in your bones, a promise of broken skies and a good old-fashioned electrical show. The air smells of salt and fried clams, and the gulls are screaming like they know something I don’t. I’m holed up at the Sea Scape Motel, room 204, with its peeling wallpaper and view of the angry Atlantic, which suits me fine. I'm staring down a long, wet afternoon with nothing but the television’s blurry offerings for company. Not good. Not good at all.  So, I pull on my sneakers, the ones with the perpetually untied laces, and head out into that heavy, humid air. The Phillips Square shopping center isn’t far, and I figure Welsh Drugs might have reading materials to keep the brain busy. I zip up my windbreaker and...