80s News Today

Benny Hill was one of many British cultural phenomenons to cross the Atlantic during the 1980s. But while TV viewers on this side of the pond were limited to wondering if Mr. Hill and Ozzy Osbourne had ever been seen together in the same room, Brits were busy becoming the ribald scamp via their home computers. On March 1, 1986, Benny Hill's Madcap Chase began to play out on the ZX Spectrum.  While the game begins with a photo-realistic scanned image of the comedian, the surprisingly large sprite of Mr. Hill players controlled looked more like Austin Powers when scrolling sideways - a remarkable feat, given that the swinging spy character wouldn't even be conceived of for another five years. Only when he turns to face the camera is he somewhat recognizable, chiefly on the basis of his desperate grin and granny glasses, and the aura of impending disaster that surrounds him like cheap aftershave. Benny lopes along with a gait that suggests both unholy enthusiasm and imminent card...

The snow had started again that February, the kind of late-winter storm that comes in sideways and stays, blanketing the little Maryland town in white silence. Kids trudged home from school with heads down, boots crunching, dreaming already of the weekend and the glow of television screens. But in one basement on Maple Street, the kind of basement that smelled of damp concrete and old Christmas lights, something beyond their imagination was waiting to be born. The date was February 25, 1986. A company called Konami released a Nintendo Entertainment System cartridge— Gradius . Now, Gradius was a mean piece of work. It was a scrolling space shooter that didn't just want your quarters; it wanted your dignity. The arcade version had been out for months, a cruel, beautiful machine that ate quarters like a dragon hoards gold. Too hard, they said. Too punishing. The ships exploded in seconds, shredded by enemy fire, and the pilots—those pale teenagers with shaking hands—walked away cursin...

NEW YORK CITY — The sun crawled over the Manhattan skyline like a bruised eye this morning, but for the denizens of the underworld and the literary elite alike, the light was blinding for a different reason. The New York Times Bestseller List—that holy scroll of high-brow validation—has finally been breached by the barbarians. Nicholas Pileggi’s Wiseguy has officially debuted on the list today, February 16, 1986. It is a grim, jagged spike in the heart of the "polite" reading public. Pileggi has done it. He didn't just write a book; he performed a public autopsy on the American Dream, using the vocal cords of one Henry Hill—a man who lived his life in the wet, red gears of the Lucchese crime family. "As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster." It’s a line that drips with a terrible, infectious honesty. It’s the kind of truth that makes the suburban book-club set tremble in their loafers. They want to believe the Mafia is a collection of o...

The morning of January 28th, 1986, was cold. Too cold. A bone-biting, rivet-popping cold that had no business lingering on the Florida coast. But there it was, a grim, unwelcome guest, making the breath steam in front of your face and frosting the windshields of every car from Cocoa Beach to Orlando. You could feel it in your teeth, that cold, a deep ache that seemed to hint at something wrong. Down at Cape Canaveral, the space shuttle Challenger sat on the pad, a gleaming white needle against a sky that was too blue, too clear, too innocent. Inside, seven souls were strapped in, ready to punch a hole in that perfect sky and ride a controlled explosion into the heavens. Among them was Christa McAuliffe, the teacher. The everywoman. The smiling face that made it all seem so close, so real, so possible. America watched. We always did, back then. We gathered around our televisions, in classrooms and living rooms, sipping coffee or juice, a collective gasp of anticipation held tight in our...

It was January 15, 1986, and the sky over America had been open for a long time—too long, some said. The big white dishes in backyards from Maine to Malibu had been drinking in the signals like thirsty men at an open bar, pulling down movies and boxing matches and late-night specials from satellites that didn't care who was watching. HBO and Cinemax had been up there, naked and unashamed, beaming their treasures to anyone with a dish and a dream. No locks. No keys. Just the cold beauty of open transmission. Then came the day the locks turned. HBO and Cinemax, you see, they weren't happy about all those freeloaders. They’d been bleeding money, like a wound that won’t quite close, every time a dish owner snagged their programming without subscribing. For years, the sky had been an open buffet. If you had a satellite dish in your backyard, you were a god. You reached up and plucked Ghostbusters or Gremlins right out of the ether, free as a summer breeze. HBO and Cinemax were t...

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...

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...

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 ...

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 ...

The city, she’s a greedy old sow, and she’s always hungry. You think she cares about your memories? Your first Christmas window display, your mother’s perfume counter? Forget it. The city just wants what’s next. Thirty-eight years ago, on a crisp fall day that promised nothing but the usual urban squalor, a great hole opened up in Herald Square. On September 28, 1986, the lights went out. The doors locked. The escalators froze. Gimbels , that sprawling giant at 33rd Street and Broadway, was dead. And if you listen close, on a foggy New York night, you might still hear the echoes of its final day, like a ghost rattling its chains in the dark. The liquidation sale had been a cruel, lingering wound. People, with that particular vulture-like hunger that comes from thinking you’re getting something for nothing, had picked the store’s bones clean. They’d walked out with cheap toasters and discount sweaters, like little parasites carrying away their last bits of carrion. But even in their tri...

Nineteen-eighty-six, that glittering, synth-soaked moment when America is flexing, preening, dreaming in Technicolor. The economy’s roaring like a Trans Am, Wall Street’s snorting lines of pure ambition, and the kids—those latchkey warriors in acid-washed jeans—are hungry for something bold, something that screams individuality, while still fitting neatly into a lunchbox.  And so it was that in the linoleum canyons of a supermarket, the fluorescent lights blared, and the shopping cart rattled and clattered, and there it was, sitting there, right there on the shelf, between the Nacho Cheese and the Taco flavors, a new flavor! a new—Cool! Ranch! DORITOS! Cool Ranch Doritos hit the shelves like a meteor, their turquoise bag a beacon in the snack aisle, whispering rebellion to every teen grabbing a fistful between rounds of OutRun . It wasn't just a chip; it was a lifestyle, a vibe, a mood. You didn't just eat Cool Ranch Doritos—you experienced them. The name itself? Genius. Cool...

Wham! Blam! Shazam! Ladies and gentlemen, the future, in all its retail glory, descended upon Owings Mills, Maryland, on August 26, 1986. Forget your quaint little Main Streets, your dusty emporiums with their creaking floorboards and polite, whispered transactions. This, my friends, was the Owings Mills Fashion Mall , a gleaming, chrome-and-glass titan of commerce, a veritable cathedral of consumption, and its Grand Opening was nothing short of a Happening of the highest order. 820,000 square feet of air-conditioned paradise, 155 stores and eateries beckoning like sirens to the upwardly-mobile masses, 26 minutes from downtown Baltimore. There they were, the shoppers of the eighties, those status-anxious strivers in their pastel Lacoste polo shirts and pleated khakis, the women in shoulder-padded blazers and leg-warmers, fur coats draped over their shoulders even in the summer swelter—because why not? This wasn't just a mall; it was the Fashion Mall , tres chic , a shrine to the A...