80s News Today

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—...

It was a Friday, the kind of gray, late-February afternoon where the winter is tired of being winter but spring hasn’t yet found its courage. February 27, 1987. A day like any other for the folks in Westin Hills, maybe, but for the rest of us—the ones who spent our pocket change on popcorn and terror—it was the day the Boogeyman finally got a face. Or at least, a history. A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors didn’t just slouch into theaters; it kicked the door down. We’d seen Freddy before, sure. We knew the sweater, the hat, the glove that looked like it had been forged in the basement of some hellish hardware store. But Dream Warriors was different. It was the moment Wes Craven came back to his creation and whispered, "Let’s show them why he’s really mean." See, horror is a funny thing. It works best in the dark, but if you want it to truly haunt a man, you have to give the monster a soul—even if that soul is as black as a coal chute. This movie did the heavy liftin...

February of 1987. The shadows are long, and the winds are brisk in Maryland. And a new tome from Stephen King has arrived at Crown Books. A book quite unlike his others, a story that still lingers in the smoke and shadow of my mind. That day saw the publication of The Eyes of the Dragon in a grand, illustrated hardcover by Viking.  The Eyes of the Dragon wasn't a story to curdle your blood or make you jump at shadows (not mostly). It was a fable. A high fantasy. A story written, as the legend goes, not for the millions of horror hounds who ravenously consumed his tales of possessed cars and vampiric towns, but for his own daughter, Naomi. She had asked her father to write something she could read. Something not too scary. And so, he did. He traded the dark, grimy streets of Castle Rock for the medieval kingdom of Delain. He set aside the monsters from beyond the graves and the stars and gave us the classic archetypes of high fantasy: a noble king (King Roland), a beautiful a...

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...

The wind off the Chesapeake has a way of biting through a denim jacket like a piranha on meth, and on February 24, 1987, it was howling. But inside that sprawling slab of brick and glass in Glen Burnie, the air smelled like buttered popcorn, Orange Julius, and the kind of high-octane optimism you can only find in a suburban shopping mecca. Marley Station Mall was finally open. It sat there on Ritchie Highway like a landed mothership, all gleaming neon and promises. For the folks in Anne Arundel County, it wasn't just a place to buy a pair of Toughskins at Sears or a blender at Hecht’s. It was a temple of the New Age. You walked through those sliding glass doors and the world turned from February gray to a kingdom of chrome and potted ferns. Inside, it was brighter than day. Skylights poured white light across marble-look tile. Escalators moved like patient rivers, carrying laughing teenagers up to the second level where the arcades waited with their Pac-Man beeps and the first whi...

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...

I have come here not to bury Kilroy, but to praise him. Or, more accurately, it. Kilroy Was Here is the brilliant concept album released by Styx on February 22, 1983. It's also the album that supposedly destroyed the band, and has been lambasted and mocked by many a music critic and fair-weather Styx fan who possess an irrational hatred of Dennis DeYoung. And by members of Styx who possess an equally-irrational hatred of Dennis DeYoung. Woe unto them who cannot realize that without Dennis DeYoung, most of the band's fanbase and record buyers would never have heard of Styx. Rock critics already had their sharp snark out for the band once it gained megasuccess in the late 70s, and, look, how many times do we look back at a biting critique of an album in Rolling Stone that reads as positively moronic thirty years later? A lot. Critics hate art that is understood and embraced by a circle wider than themselves. But the turncoats among Styx fans cannot be excused so easily. As far ...