Welcome to RetroVaultArchive
I still have a few of my original Transformers, a few Go-Bots, one or two action figures and most of my original Atari 2600. Not displayed anywhere, just in a box in a closet. That’s the way things typically end up, but I know exactly which ones they are and I’m not getting rid of them. This probably tells you everything you need to know about why this archive exists.
Growing up, like a lot of kids from the 70’s and 80’s, I was surrounded by toys and games - my Star Wars figure collection that took over an entire shelf, G.I. Joe, M.A.S.K., Hot Wheels and Matchbox, and more board games than any family actually needed. Then an NES showed up for a birthday with Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! and I stayed up most of the night playing it. After that came the Sega Genesis, then PlayStation. At some point the toys stopped, but what remained was a lifelong love of those toys, games, and gadgets.
Most of this stuff is gone now. Not just off store shelves, but actually gone, and the only evidence left is a photo or our vaugue memory of what it felt like to play with one.
That’s what this is for.
RetroVaultArchive is an ongoing record of the toys, board games, video game hardware, and assorted oddities of the 20th century. Each post takes one item and puts together everything worth knowing about it, like when it came out, who made it, what made it strange or popular, what happened to it.
The items will fall into four categories. Toys will cover the 1930s through the 1990s. Tabletop and Games does the same for board games and card games. Video Game History picks up in the 1970s and runs through the early 2000s. The Oddities File is for everything that doesn’t fit, like recalls, the regional exclusives, the products that existed only briefly, or things that I just find interesting or odd.
New posts go out two to three times a week, free.
A few pieces are already up if you want to start somewhere.
Thanks for being here.