My brother and I had a system. I remember us excitedly planning out new routes, one of us would call out moves “forward three, turn right, forward two,” and the other would punch them into the keypad. Then we’d watch it roll off across the carpet, navigating whatever obstacle course we’d set up across the living room floor, and either complete the run perfectly or veer into a chair leg or run into a wall because one of us had miscounted the turns. We spent hours on this. We didn’t think of it as programming. It was just the game we played with the tank.

It was programming, though. That’s the thing about Big Trak that still surprises people when you tell them: this was a consumer toy, sold in 1979 at Sears and Kay-Bee and Toys R Us, and it contained a genuine programmable microprocessor. You entered a sequence of up to 16 commands into its keypad, movement in any direction, rotation by angle, a pause, a firing of the front-mounted photon cannon light, and it executed them in order. The Logo turtle robots that would become standard classroom programming tools in the 1980s would come later. Big Trak was there first, sitting under Christmas trees.

The toy that almost wasn’t

Milton Bradley released Big Trak in 1979 at a retail price of around $43, designed and manufactured in the United States. It was white, roughly the size of a shoe box, shaped like a six-wheeled futuristic tank, with a black dashboard section housing the keypad and a blue photon cannon mounted at the front. It required six D-cell batteries. There was also a transport trailer accessory which was sold separately. You could load it with objects and have Big Trak deliver them to someone across the room, which was an extremely impressive party trick for 1979.

The origin story of Big Trak is also one that toy history books mostly skip. According to a first-person account in a This American Life episode, an 11-year-old named Peter Ocko connected a Simon circuit board to a set of motors and arrived at the core concept of a programmable vehicle you could instruct in advance. His father, who worked at Milton Bradley, developed the idea into what became Big Trak. The idea worked. Big Trak became one of Milton Bradley’s biggest sellers. Years later, Peter Ocko, now a teenager, sued Milton Bradley for $2 million in royalties. The case went to trial, but he lost, on contract grounds. The story received some press coverage at the time, but has been quietly buried ever since. It doesn’t appear in most toy histories of Big Trak at all.

Why it worked

Big Trak arrived at a specific cultural moment. The late 1970s were full of space-age futurism, Star Wars was two years old, the Atari 2600 had just launched, microcomputers were starting to appear in magazines if not yet in homes. The toy looked like something from a movie set and it did something no toy had quite done before, it made children feel like they were operating real technology. You weren’t playing pretend. You were writing instructions and watching them execute.

Museums Victoria, which holds an original UK specimen in its collection, describes Big Trak as believed to be the first commercially available programmable toy sold in the world. That idea matters, not “one of the earliest” or “among the first” but the first. Whether that designation survives scrutiny across every possible competitor is a question for experts.

Big Trak sold well enough that Milton Bradley produced it through the early 1980s before discontinuing it as programmable toys became cheaper and more sophisticated. It was never recalled. It simply faded away.

What happened after

The original Big Trak had a quiet life in the 1980s and 1990s, living in attics and appearing at garage sales. Then in 2010, a UK company called Zeon Limited relaunched it. It was essentially the same toy, same keypad layout, same six-wheeled design, same photon cannon. It sold well again. A follow-up model called the BigTrak XTR added off-road capability and an optional camera mount. The relaunches confirmed what collectors already knew, the affection for this particular toy runs unusually deep.

It also made a brief appearance in film history. The Big Trak appears in Steven Spielberg’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial in 1982, visible in Elliott’s room in early scenes. If you have a copy, go look. It’s there.

Collector notes

Original 1979 Big Traks are not rare exactly, but complete working examples in good condition have become increasingly hard to find. The six D-cell battery requirement means that untested units frequently have corrosion in the battery compartment. Look for that specifically when evaluating a purchase, it’s the most common reason working examples stop working. Complete in-box examples in clean condition were selling in the $150–$250 range in recent years, with exceptional examples higher. The 2010 relaunch units are widely available and inexpensive; they scratch the nostalgia itch but are not the same object.

The transport trailer is the accessory to watch for. Loose trailers are uncommon, and a complete original set with trailer in the box is genuinely collectible. Check eBay sold listings for current values.

Did you have Big Trak, or something like it, a toy that required you to enter a sequence before anything happened? I’m curious whether the “program it first, watch it run” mechanic was as universal a childhood experience as I remember it being, or whether this was a specific kind of kid thing.

Image: Based on a GPL work by User:MartinLing on 2006-04-30, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.