80s News Today

Thirty-five years ago today—March 7, 1989—Arista Records released the debut album by  Milli Vanilli , titled Girl You Know It’s True. Now, if you're under 30, you might be asking, "Milli who?" And if you're over 50, you're probably already shaking your head and muttering, "Oh no, not this again." But stick with me here. The album? Huge. Massive. Went six-times platinum. Spent weeks at number one. Had hits like "Girl You Know It's True," "Baby Don't Forget My Number," "Girl I'm Gonna Miss You," and of course "Blame It on the Rain." You couldn't turn on the radio without hearing one of these songs. It was everywhere. Grammy for Best New Artist in 1990. You remember Rob and Fab, right? Two fellas from Germany who looked like they’d been sculpted out of high-end marzipan. They had the spandex, they had the shoulder pads, they had the dance moves. The only thing they didn't have? Their own voices. T...

Now, friends, gather ’round while I tell you of a most peculiar contraption that has found its way into the parlors of the nation this February of 1989. It is called the Nintendo Entertainment System, a grey box of electronic wizardry that promises to transport a body into worlds unseen without ever having to scrub a single fence-post. It seems the folks at Seta have seen fit to take the American hero Tom Sawyer—a boy who, I can testify, has a natural aversion to anything resembling honest labor—and trap him inside a plastic cartridge. They call it The Adventures of Tom Sawyer , though I suspect Tom himself would find the whole business far more exhausting than a Sunday school lesson. In this digital diversion, you take up the role of Tom, though he’s looking a bit more square-edged than I remember. He’s wandering through his own dreams, it seems, which is just like a boy of his temperament. But instead of the peaceful Mississippi, he’s beset by all manner of fantastical nuisances—...

February 18, 1989. The kind of winter day that feels like a gray woolen blanket soaked in cold slush. Down at the local Video King—sandwiched between a fading laundromat and a pizza joint that smelled of scorched oregano—a new kind of terror arrived in a purple box. LJN's logo stared out from the front, that cartoonish red scar across the title, promising something forbidden. Friday the 13th . Not the movies, not really—those were for the drive-in, for the back row where you could pretend the screams were someone else's. This was for the living room, for the gray glow of the television at three in the afternoon when your parents were still at work and the house felt too big and too empty. Now, you might scoff. A video game? How much terror can a bunch of pixels really inflict? Believe you me, dear reader, if you were a kid back then, huddled in the glow of a cathode ray tube, the terror was real. It was the kind of creeping dread that starts in your stomach and crawls up your t...

The year was 1989, and the Eighties, that decade-long fiesta of excess and ambition, was drawing its final, magnificent breaths. It was a time when the hemlines went up and the interest rates went down, when shoulder pads were architectural and cocaine was a business accessory. And into this glittering, grunting, acquisitive tableau, on the seventh day of February, dropped an album that would become not merely a record, but a cultural battlefield: 2 Live Crew’s As Nasty as They Wanna Be . It landed like a dirty bomb on the immaculate, manicured lawns of polite society. Nasty was not just "explicit"—it was a seismic event, a sonic middle finger, a raw, unvarnished, unapologetic eruption of what was, at the time, considered the absolute outer limits of indecency. This was not the coy suggestion of Madonna, nor the rebellious snarl of Guns N' Roses. No, this was Luther Campbell, a.k.a. Luke Skyywalker, and his crew, bellowing about sex, about bodies, about acts—in excruciati...

Ah, the late '80s, that glittering, gaudy vortex of excess! Los Angeles, the Sunset Strip – a neon-lit jungle where dreams clawed their way up from the gutters, enveloped in hairspray and leather pants, electric guitars screaming like banshees in the night! And into this maelstrom, on January 31, 1989, bursts Warrant , those Hollywood hustlers, unleashing their debut album Dirty Rotten Filthy Stinking Rich upon an unsuspecting world hungry for hooks, for heartaches wrapped in power chords, for anthems that could make the stadiums shake and the groupies swoon. Pow! There it was, certified platinum, storming the charts with its sleazy swagger, peaking at number 10 on the Billboard 200, spawning hits that blasted through car radios and MTV screens like fireworks in a fireworks factory explosion! The title alone encapsulating the 80s zeitgeist! But while Warrant visually resembled the glam bands that were a dime a dozen in the wake of Poison and Theatre of Pain -era Motley Crüe, the b...

Detroit. January 11, 1989 Brrrrrr! The North American International Auto Show, that great glittering world exposition of horsepower and hubris, where the air hung thick with the scent of fresh wax, exhaust fumes, and the faint whiff of desperation from the Big Three, all huddled under the cavernous roof of Cobo Hall like so many mastodons sensing the meteor's shadow. The crowds! The flashbulbs popping like champagne corks at a debutante ball! The suits—oh, the suits!—strutting and preening, the German barons from Mercedes and BMW with their steely gazes and precision-engineered smirks, the American moguls in their pinstripes and power ties, chewing cigars and slapping backs, all convinced that luxury was their birthright, their domain, a fortress built of leather seats and V-8 thunder that no upstart could breach. And then—whoosh!—out of the East, silent as a ninja's blade, came the Lexus ! Unveiled that fateful morning: the LS 400, the flagship, the killer, a sedan so smooth i...

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...

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 ...

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...

The basement smelled like wet pennies and old secrets when I first slid that gray cartridge into the Famicom, back in December of ’89. Japan only, they said.  Sweet Home , they called it. A movie tie-in nobody over here was supposed to see. The label was in kanji I couldn’t read, but the picture told the story plain enough: five people walking into a mansion that looked like it had been coughing up graves for a hundred years. I was home alone, parents gone for the weekend, and the snow was coming down so hard the streetlights looked like ghosts drowning in milk. I hit power. The title screen bled onto the tube with a sound like someone dragging a cello bow across a rusty fence. There was the titular manor itself, glowering down at the countryside below. As if the house itself was introducing itself, clearing its throat before it swallowed you whole. You play as five poor bastards who make their living photographing old ruins (a real estate crew, a cleaner, a couple of kids with cam...

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...

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 was a chilly, unremarkable Friday in a thousand places, the kind of autumn day where the sun felt like a pale lie pasted against a high, cold sky. October 20th, 1989. The smell of damp leaves and dying grass was everywhere. And in bookstores across the country, stacked neatly between the celebrity memoirs and the historical romances, a weighty new novel landed with a heavy, disturbing thud: Stephen King's The Dark Half . It was more than just a book release; it was the arrival of a new kind of trouble, dressed up in a dust jacket. The story was familiar, because the best horrors always are. It dealt with a man, Thad Beaumont , a decent, literary writer who had long used a pseudonym—a vulgar, successful bastard named George Stark —to publish his violent, money-making paperbacks. Thad had tried to be done with the alter ego, even giving him a symbolic burial in a magazine exposé. He’d thought the whole sorry business was finished. But things don't stay buried, not in the world...

Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers , they called it. A title that rolled off the tongue like a curse whispered in the confessional, promising not just revenge, but the primal, inexorable pull of blood calling to blood under the harvest moon. Directed by the Swiss-born visionary Dominique Othenin-Girard—yes, a man from the land of cuckoo clocks and alpine precision, tasked with herding the chaos of a slasher franchise through its twilight years—this film arrived like a jagged line on the EKG of '80s horror, beeping insistently that the Boogeyman was not done with us yet. Picture the scene, if you will, in the heartland of Haddonfield, Illinois—that mythic Everytown, U.S.A., where the picket fences gleam whiter than a televangelist's smile and the maple leaves skitter across lawns like fleeing sinners. It's been a full year since the events of Halloween 4 , that fever-dream resurrection where Michael Myers, the Shape himself, clawed his way back from the abyss to claim...

Before the Nickelodeon Hotel, the cable channel embarked on its first voyage out of the cathode ray tube into real life: the Nick at Nite TV Land Mall Tour . The date is etched in the calendar like a tattoo on a sailor's forearm: October 6, 1989.  Picture this: The sky over Long Island is that particular autumnal gray, the kind that makes the sodium-vapor lamps in the parking lot flicker on early, casting everything in a glow that's half diner at midnight, half perpetual twilight zone. Green Acres Shopping Center, this behemoth of a mall—two levels of linoleum dreams, anchored by Macy's on one end and Gertz on the other, with escalators humming like the arteries of some great retail beast—has been prepped for invasion. And what an invasion! Nick at Nite, that sly after-dark alter ego of the kiddie channel Nickelodeon, the one that's been beaming reruns into living rooms since 1985 like a bootlegger slinging moonshine in a racetrack parking lot, has rolled up with the fu...

O noble readers, gather close, and let me weave for you a tale of wonder, as intricate as the silks of Samarkand and as daring as the heroes of old. I am Robert Dyer, spinner of stories, and tonight, under the starlit canopy of imagination, I recount the marvelous birth of a legend on the third day of October, in the year of our world 1989—a tale of a game called Prince of Persia , brought forth upon the humble Apple II. The Apple II, that modest steed of technology, bore this epic with pride. Though its colors were few and its sounds simple, it carried the prince’s tale with a clarity that needed no embellishment. In a realm not of sand and spice, but of circuits and code, there dwelt a young scribe named Jordan Mechner, a visionary whose heart burned with the fire of creation. For years, he toiled in solitude, his fingers dancing upon the keys of his Apple II as if plucking the strings of a lute, crafting a story not of ink, but of pixels. His dream? To breathe life into a prince, a ...

From the desk of  Patrick Bateman Listen, let’s cut to the chase—September 24, 1989, was a night that pulsed with a certain kind of raw, primal energy, the kind that makes your blood hum and your pulse quicken, like the moment before you close a deal or snap a neck. ABC-TV aired The Preppie Murder , a made-for-TV movie that laid bare the sordid, intoxicating tale of Robert Chambers and the death of Jennifer Levin in Central Park. It’s the kind of film that demands a chilled martini in one hand and a copy of The Wall Street Journal in the other, because, let’s face it, it’s not just a murder—it’s a brand . A narrative polished to a glossy sheen, served up for the masses to devour while they’re ironing their Brooks Brothers shirts or flipping through Vogue . I was in my apartment that night, of course, the one with the bone-white walls and the Eames chair that costs more than most people’s rent. The TV was on, a sleek Sony Trinitron, its glow reflecting off the glass coffee table li...

It’s September, and the goldenrod of late summer is just beginning to yield to the crisp, knowing breath of autumn. But inside the air-conditioned caverns of your local electronics and toy emporiums, a different kind of season is dawning. The season of the Lynx. The Atari Lynx . Well, it says Atari on the machine and the box. But it's actually from the mind of Epyx, a legendary software developer in the golden age of the Commodore 64. We are entering into the period where Atari is ceasing to develop its own video game hardware, that will culminate in utter 1990s failure. Did you ever hear the tragedy of the Atari Jaguar? I thought not. The kids in the back of the station wagon, they were the first to see it, to really feel it coming. Not hear it, not just hear the talk on the blacktop or the whispers in the dim-lit aisles of the arcade, but see it. See it in the magazines, glossy and bright, with some kind of advertisement. This Atari Lynx—it wasn't like the others.  You see, ...

"RISE FROM YOUR GRAVE!" With the thundering words of Zeus himself echoing around the world, Japanese game company Sega proceeded to do just that in September of 1989. Out on the coasts, in the sun-drenched, palm-tree swaying land of California and amid the staggering towers and mayhem of New York – always a step ahead, aren't they? – the first whispers had begun on August 14. Little black boxes, sleek and dark as a fresh-dug grave, had started appearing on store shelves. " Sega Genesis ," the labels read, in a sci-fi font. But that was just the appetizer, a taste of what was coming, a single drop of blood before the main event. Because come September, that’s when the beast was truly unleashed. Nationwide. Sega had spent the mid-80s as an also-ran underdog. The 8-bit Sega Master System had nowhere near the number of hot titles or library size that Nintendo's NES boasted. But as the decade reached its end, it was planning its revenge. The Genesis would delive...