80s News Today

Do you see them? These are the new wizards, the digital alchemists of Access Software out in the suburban sprawl of Salt Lake City. And what have they conjured up for the winter of 1984? They call it Raid Over Moscow. Picture the scene: It is January. The sky is the color of a bruised plum. In every split-level ranch from Levittown to Palo Alto, the Commodore 64—that beige breadbox of destiny, that 64-kilobyte marvel of the New Era—groans with the weight of the Apocalypse. And there it is on the screen! The Great Bear itself! The USSR! Only they aren't playing fair, are they? The storyline tells us the U.S. has dismantled its nukes—The Great Disarmament!—and now the Soviets, those "deceitful aggressors," have launched a sneak attack! Your mission? Not just to defend, but to STRIKE BACK!  You aren't just a boy in a striped velour shirt anymore. You are a Stealth Pilot! You guide your craft out of the hangar—taps, nudges, frantic stick-wiggling—trying not to scrape the ...

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...

Managua, January 10, 1985 The tropical sun dipping low over the Plaza de la Revolución, that vast concrete expanse named for the very upheavals that birthed it, now thrumming with the electric hum of a new era. There he was, Daniel Ortega Saavedra , all of 39 years old, stepping up to the podium like a matador in olive drab, the guerrilla turned statesman, the former bank-robbing revolutionary now draped in the blue-and-white presidential sash over his fatigues—yes, fatigues!—as if to say, "Comrades, the fight goes on, but now with ballots and briefcases!" He sports those signature oversized spectacles—thick, dark frames that give him the look of a militant librarian who has just finished shelving the works of Marx and is now ready to seize the means of production. Around him, the plaza is a sea of red and black—the colors of the FSLN—waving, snapping, popping in the heat. It is a tableau of the New Left’s wildest dreams. You can practically smell the mixture of diesel exhaus...

It is January 9, 1981—though, in the neon-flicker of our collective memory, it feels more like Year Zero. A divorced, balding Englishman sits in a cold studio, nursing a heartbreak that would have sent a lesser mortal to the bottom of a gin bottle. But not Phil. No, Phil Collins has a drum machine and a grudge that could power the National Grid. For more than three-and-a-half minutes, the world is a vacuum. It is a minimalist’s nightmare. Tick-thwack. Tick-thwack. A ghostly, gated-reverb pulse. Collins whispers—he doesn't sing, he hisses—about a drowning man and the "long time coming." The tension is unbearable. It is the sonic equivalent of staring at a closed door, knowing something terrible is breathing on the other side. Picture it: the airwaves crackling, radios dialed in across the fog-shrouded isles of Britain first, then rippling out like shockwaves from a detonated dream. Collins, that Everyman with the voice of a wounded angel, had been pounding skins for years...

Let us journey back to January 8, 1981, to a place in France so delightfully obscure it practically begged for something utterly out of the ordinary to happen: Trans-en-Provence. Now, Trans-en-Provence is, by all accounts, a perfectly normal, entirely un-interstellar sort of village. The kind of place where the biggest excitement is probably a well-baked baguette or a spirited debate about the correct ripeness of cheese. So, you can imagine the sheer, unadulterated bafflement that must have descended upon Monsieur Renato Nicolai, a gentleman of a robust seventy-five years, when his otherwise unremarkable day took a turn for the cosmically peculiar. Mr Nicolai, being a practical sort, was not the type to gaze at the stars pondering the meaning of life; he was more concerned with whether the pump would survive another Provençal winter. Life, for him, was straightforward: earth, sky, cheese, occasional glass of rosé. Then came the whistle. Not a particularly dramatic whistle, mind you...

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...

There it was. The Click-Clack-Zzzzzzt of the cassette drive, a sound like a swarm of electric locusts devouring a silicon harvest. It was January 6, 1980, and the Great Gods of Avalon Hill had just handed the American suburbanite the ultimate status symbol: the power to vaporize Moscow from the comfort of a swivel chair. There it was, gentlemen, in the crisp winter light of a new decade, slipping quietly into the world like a sleek, variable-swept-wing bomber emerging from the hangar: B-1 Nuclear Bomber , released for the Apple II. No fanfare, no ticker-tape parade down Silicon Valley's nascent boulevards—just a cassette tape or floppy disk in a box, priced for the serious enthusiast, arriving at computer shops and hobby stores where the new breed of masters of the universe gathered. B-1 Nuclear Bomber was not, emphatically not, a game for the casual Atari-paddle-wielding plebeian. Oh no. This was a Serious Simulation, a high-fidelity, low-resolution plunge into the heart of the ul...