80s News Today

In the brisk February of 1988, the Atari computer owners of Britain discovered a small, digital miracle called Henry’s House . Now, the Atari 8-bit family was, by 1988, a bit like a venerable old relative who insists on wearing a tuxedo to a backyard barbecue—charming, surprisingly capable, but everyone suspected their time was nearly up. Yet, into this sunset period stepped young Henry. The premise of Henry’s House is one of those things that makes you want to lie down in a darkened room with a damp cloth over your eyes. It is a platform game about Prince Harry of Wales. Yes, that Prince Harry. The one who, at the time, was a toddler whose primary achievements involved being third in line to a very large throne and occasionally wearing adorable jumpers. The reception, dear reader, was not merely positive. It was glowing. Magazines that normally reserved their highest praise for things like "slightly less flickery than last month’s offering" suddenly found themselves reachin...

It was a Tuesday in Tokyo, but it felt like the end of the world. Or maybe the beginning of a new, stranger one. It was a cold February morning in 1988, the kind where the wind bites at your cheeks like tiny, invisible teeth, and the sun hangs low in the sky, too lazy to chase away the shadows. Japan was humming along like it always did—salarymen shuffling to their trains, kids bundled up on their way to school, the whole machine of society grinding its gears without a hitch. But something was brewing under the surface, something dark and insatiable, like one of those ancient curses from the old folktales. On February 10th, the beast was unleashed: Dragon Quest III , or as they called it over here in the States, Dragon Warrior III . It wasn't just a game; it was a monster, and it devoured the country whole. Imagine, if you will, a line. Not a line for bread or a line for the draft, but a line of nearly four million people—a human snake winding through the neon-slicked streets of Sh...

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...

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...

In the waning days of the year of Our Lord nineteen hundred and eighty-eight, when the twelfth moon had waxed full and the first day of December lay cold upon the land like a shroud of fresh-fallen snow, a great and terrible wonder was loosed upon the children of the Americas: a golden cartridge, small as a reliquary, bearing the name The Legend of Zelda II: The Adventure of Link . Would-be Hyrulean crusaders huddled in the dim-lit halls of a Sears in the kingdom of Maryland, where the air smelled of popcorn and plastic and the desperate hopes of lads who had begged their sires for one more treasure before Yule. The shelves were battlefields already scarred by the wars of Christmases past. There stood the first Zelda, its gold gleaming like the hoard of some ancient king, luring us into green fields and dark dungeons where a boy in green might become a hero with naught but courage and a wooden sword. We had wandered those lands for nigh two years, mapping every bombable wall, whisperin...

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...

November 8, 1988. The very air itself, brothers and sisters, was thick with it! Not just the usual whiff of stale ambition and light beer that hangs over every American election, no sir. This was the culmination, the apotheosis, the very zing! of the Age of Reagan, now metastasizing, transforming, elevating itself into something else. Something…Bush! Yes, George Herbert Walker Bush ! The man, the myth, the scion of privilege with the patrician grin, the tennis whites, the entire gestalt of New England rectitude mixed with a Texas drawl as authentic as a Hollywood stagecoach. And what a stage it was! The nation, awash in the glow of Morning in America, flush with material prosperity, high on the sheer, unadulterated chutzpah of eight years of Reaganomics!  The stock market was roaring, the Soviets were…well, they were still the Soviets, but they seemed to be doing it with a little less conviction, a little more glasnost! America felt good, damn good! And into this fertile, ego-stro...

November 4, 1988. Mark that date in your calendars with a big red Sharpie, because that’s the day John Carpenter’s masterpiece THEY LIVE hit theaters and ripped the mask off the New World Order like a chainsaw through a copy of Das Kapital . The plot? Simple, and frankly, disturbing: A drifter named Nada, played by professional wrestler "Rowdy" Roddy Piper, a real guy in a fake world, finds a pair of sunglasses that expose the truth about who really runs the show. These aren't just any Ray-Bans, oh no. These are truth-seeing glasses. And when he puts them on, what does he see? He sees the world for what it truly is. He sees the subliminal messages plastered on billboards, on magazines, on television screens: "OBEY," "CONSUME," "DO NOT QUESTION AUTHORITY!" They're everywhere, folks, brainwashing you, programming you, turning you into compliant sheep. When Nada looks at the people in power with the glasses on, the ones pulling the strings,...

It was a Tuesday night in the fall of 1988, the kind where the air hangs heavy with the scent of decaying leaves and the first real bite of winter's teeth. October 25th, to be precise—a date that doesn't scream apocalypse at first glance, but it should. That's when Geraldo Rivera cracked open the nation's living rooms and invited the shadows right in. Devil Worship: Exposing Satan's Underground . Two hours of prime-time terror, beamed straight into 19.8 million homes. The TV flickered like a candle in a crypt, and suddenly, America wasn't just watching the devil—they were feeling his breath on their necks. Geraldo took us by the hand – or maybe by the throat – and dragged us down into what he promised was "Satan's Underground." Two hours, live, no commercials for the first half hour, just pure, unadulterated fear pumped straight into the living rooms of the unsuspecting by NBC. The camera panned over supposed ritual sites, the hushed, urgent tones ...

The wind, it howled that October in '88, didn't it? A real banshee wail, rattling the windowpanes like a skeleton trying to claw its way out of the earth. And what better soundtrack for the return of a boogeyman? That's right, folks, on October 21st, 1988, Michael Myers, the Shape himself, lumbered back into our lives with Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers . It had been years since we'd seen his pale, expressionless mask. Halloween III …well, that was a whole other kettle of fish, wasn’t it? A noble attempt to try something new, but we wanted the man. The pure, unadulterated evil. And God, did they give him back to us. The movie opens like a slow, creaking door to a mausoleum. Michael's been in a coma, wasting away in some forgotten institution, and you just know, you just know he's been biding his time. Sleeping, maybe dreaming of carving pumpkins… or something a little more substantial. He hears about Laurie Strode's daughter, Jamie Lloyd, and that’...

On this day in 1985, the Nintendo Entertainment System was released. Oh, the NES. A marvel of technology. A digital vortex into pixelated adventures. We thought we knew what it was capable of. We thought we knew the rhythms of its digital heartbeat. Then came Dr. Chaos . It wasn't like Super Mario, all bounce and joy. It wasn't Zelda, all epic quests and legendary swords. No, Dr. Chaos was something else. It was a whispered rumor in the arcade, a shiver down the spine when you read the box description, all dark corners and an unsettling lack of cheer. You picked it up, and it felt heavier than it should, as if the plastic encased not just circuit boards, but a tiny, compressed chunk of something from another dimension. You saw the cover in the video store—a creepy mansion. A batwinged demon. A bandaged mummy. An apparent protagonist dressed to collect truffles in the Black Forest while holding a bloody knife in the middle of a Frankensteinian laboratory scene. It was cool, but ...

The leaves were turning, I recall, a canvas of fire and rust across the land, as the chill winds of October swept through the northern climes. It was a time of lengthening shadows, of hearth-fires being rekindled, and of eyes turning inward, seeking solace or adventure within the confines of one's own domain. And on the fifteenth day of that very month, a curious artifact emerged from the churning currents of innovation, carried upon the waves from distant shores, a new seed sown in the ever-expanding garden of electronic fantasy. The Sega Master System, a sleek, black beast of a console, stood sentinel in many a den and bedchamber, a challenger in a nascent war for the hearts and coin of the burgeoning gaming populace. It was a machine of promise, of vibrant colors and bold sounds, capable of conjuring worlds with a flicker of its digital soul. And into this realm, on that fateful day, came a legend already whispered in the East: Ys: The Vanished Omens. For years, the tales had be...

You're hunkered down in your basement den, the one with the water stain on the ceiling that looks like a screaming face, if you squint just right. The CRT monitor flickers like a candle in a windstorm, casting ghostlight on your hands as you boot up the old IBM PC. The internal 2" speaker beeps, and the disk drive grinds. It's not the future yet—not quite—but Neuromancer makes you believe it is. Based on William Gibson's novel, that razor-edged prophecy from 1984, the game was Interplay's mad stab at turning words into wire. The story hooks you like a fish on a barbed line. You're Case, a washed-up console cowboy, your nervous system's fried from a bad score—betrayal by the only crew you ever trusted. Molly Millions lurks in the shadows, her mirrorshades hiding eyes that could cut glass, and together you're chasing the ghost of an AI named Wintermute.  It's Chiba City first, that neon-drenched sprawl where the street finds its own uses for things. ...

There’s a house on Mercyful Lane - a manor, really - a crooked old place where the shadows don’t just linger—they crawl. It’s the kind of house that hums with secrets, where the wallpaper peels, and the air tastes of mold, rotting wood, and regret. The kind of house that has gargoyles on the peaks of its roof(!). Back on September 13, 1988, something wicked slithered out of that house, something that bestowed upon us a key to a door best left locked. That was the day King Diamond , that pale-faced conjurer of nightmares, unleashed Them upon the world—a record that didn’t just play but possessed. Now, if you knew King Diamond, you already knew you weren’t getting a sunny walk in the park. This wasn’t a man who sang about rainbows or puppies. This was a man who lived in the crypt of his own imagination, a maestro of the macabre, with a voice that could shatter glass or grumble like a Panzer tank. But Them…Them was different. King Diamond, always the storyteller, decided to invite us int...

Replacing the legendary Casey Kasem as host of American Top 40 wasn't enough of a challenge for Shadoe Stevens in 1988. No, siree, the man was going to conquer Hollywood in the same year. Backed by no less than Dino De Laurentis, a budget of $6.5 million, and the screenwriter of Raw Deal , Stevens would make his bid for celluloid greatness as disgraced former Texas state trooper and soldier of fortune Traxx .  Yes, Traxx! The very name hangs in the air like the faint aroma of stale Pop Secret and forgotten dreams! And those forgotten dreams would ultimately include Shadoe Stevens' movie career. For, you see, he shot for the moon, but merely landed among the stars...on videocassette shelves. Not destined for the gilded multiplexes, those temples of celluloid illusion where the masses flocked for their weekly dose of manufactured heroism and pre-packaged romance. No, no, my velvet-collared voyeurs of the VCR, Traxx bypassed all that. It slithered directly into the plastic clamsh...

August the Twelfth, Nineteen Hundred and Eighty-Eight. The suburban air, thick with the pre-millennial anxieties of lawn care and the bafflingly persistent popularity of Jordache jeans, crackled with a peculiar voltage. Not from some tectonic shift beneath the tract housing of the burgeoning exurbs, oh no. This jolt, dear readers, this frisson of anticipation, emanated from the nation’s darkened picture palaces, where a cinematic chimera known as Mac and Me was about to be deployed upon an unsuspecting populace. Mac and Me was America in 1988: bold, shameless, and shot through with corporate synergy. Mac and Me didn’t just premiere that day; it exploded like a grease fire in the cultural fryer. Mac and Me wasn’t just a movie; it was a corporate carnival, a love letter to McDonald’s so blatant it made The Coca-Cola Kid look like a PBS documentary. They unleashed it upon us that day. Mac and Me. Mac? Like Big Macs? Me? Like us, the unsuspecting, soon-to-be-scarred audience? The premise...

You remember it, don't you? Oh, you must remember it! July the Twenty-Seventh, Nineteen Eighty-Eight! The very air, thick with the scent of microwaved popcorn and the faint, unsettling *whirr* of your VCR rewinding that glorious, glorious footage of the '88 Olympics. The world, humming along, a carefully calibrated symphony of consumer desire and suburban aspiration. And then… *BING!* A new sound! A new promise! Not from the stock market ticker, not from the glittering, neon-drenched arcade! No, this sound, this vision of the future, would emanate from the fluorescent-lit, slightly-too-quiet aisles of your very own RadioShack! Yes, on this very day, from the quiet heart of Fort Worth, Texas, burst forth a veritable titan of the desktop. The TANDY 1000 SL! Forget your clunky, monochrome, command-line-only monstrosities. Forget your bewildering arrays of DIP switches and jumper settings. Tandy, that stalwart purveyor of electronic dreams had cooked up something different. Somet...