The Toys That Survived the Decade

The Talkboy was a toy that made you feel like a criminal mastermind at age eight. A plastic cassette recorder marketed entirely off the back of Home Alone 2, capable of playing your voice back at any speed, completely indispensable for about three months before it ended up in a drawer forever. That’s the arc of most beloved childhood objects—intense, brief, then stored somewhere and never thrown away because throwing it away would mean admitting something.

Chinese artist David Lo made a series of illustrations revisiting some of the defining toys of the eighties and nineties—the Game Boy, the Super Soaker, Hot Wheels, G.I. Joe, the Rubik’s Cube, the Talkboy—rendered with a flatness and clarity that makes them look like artifacts from a design history you actually lived through. There’s something in his illustration style that strips away the plastic sheen and gives these objects the weight of things that genuinely mattered, which they did. Highsnobiety ran a full look at the series that’s worth your time.

The Game Boy alone could carry an essay. That grey brick went everywhere with me—I played Tetris until the batteries died and then hunted for AAs with the focus of someone with actual priorities. Lonnie Johnson’s Super Soaker was a genuine engineering achievement disguised as a water gun, and every summer it turned the backyard into a cold war with soaking wet rules of engagement. You know it’s a good toy when the arguments about the rules last longer than the game itself.

The obvious gap in Lo’s selection, if you’re asking me, is the Tamagotchi—the object that first taught an entire generation that responsibility is exhausting, temporary, and ends in small digital death. But everyone’s list has a different hole in it. That’s the point of the exercise.