Inducted Toys

Top

Inducted Year: 2022 Ancient peoples of Greece and Rome amused themselves with toys resembling the spinning tops we know today. Archaeologists have found 5,000-year-old clay tops in Iraq and 3,000-year-old whip tops in China. Native peoples of the Americas played with tops in the 15th and 16th centuries. Top makers have formed their tops from clay, metal, stone, wood, and, later, rubber, tin, and plastics. Shapes and types of tops also vary, leading to the different ways in which the tops are […]

Lite-Brite

Inducted Year: 2022 In 1966, a New York City window display featuring hundreds of colored lights inspired toy creators Marvin Glass, Henry Stan, and Burt Meyer. Convinced they could design and build a plaything employing this concept, they simplified and streamlined the idea, and reduced the light source to a 25-watt light bulb. Their design placed a perforated plastic panel in front of the bulb and covered the panel with a simple sheet of black construction paper. When colored translucent plastic […]

Sand

Inducted Year: 2021 Sand may be the most universal toy in the world. From a geologist’s perspective, sand is a dry, gritty material consisting of small, loose pieces of rock, soil, minerals, and gemstones. But children recognize sand as a creative vehicle for play suitable for pouring, scooping, sieving, raking, and measuring. Wet sand is even better, ready to construct, shape, and sculpt. Historians have every reason to believe that the earliest people played in sand. As early as the 1800s, newspapers […]

Risk

Inducted Year: 2021 The French filmmaker Albert Lamorisse designed a board game with simple rules but complex interactions, La Conquête du Monde (The Conquest of the World) in 1957. Purchasing the rights, Parker Brothers published it with a few small changes as Risk in 1959. It became the first popular game involving strategy, diplomacy, conflict, and conquest.  Risk players control armies of tokens on a world map board in attempts to capture adjoining territories from other players, battling by rolls of the […]

Masters of the Universe

Inducted Year: 2022 The story of Masters of the Universe begins in 1979 when Ray Wagner of Mattel formed a Male Action Team to explore creation of the company’s next big action figure line. The company recognized that it needed to compete with the success of Kenner’s Star Wars action figures. Roger Sweet, a member of the team, added modeling clay to bulk up Big Jim. In turn, Mattel illustrator Mark Taylor developed the proposed aesthetics for the action figure and, […]

American Girl Dolls

Inducted Year: 2021 Following a visit to historic Williamsburg, Virginia, and a Christmas shopping trip for her nieces, educator and newscaster Pleasant Rowland developed and launched a line of 18-inch dolls representing an era of America’s past. Each doll was paired with rich historical narratives and accurate reproductions of clothing and accessories. Rowland decided to sell the dolls—Samantha, Kirsten, and Molly—by direct mail. Between September and December of 1986, American Girl dolls sold $1.7 million worth of product. Rowland’s formula for combining […]

Rubber Duck

  Inducted Year: 2013 Rubber toys first appeared in the late 1800s, when manufacturers made use of Charles Goodyear’s process for rendering rubber into malleable material. The first rubber ducks didn’t even float: they were cast solid and intended as chew toys. By the 1940s, rubber ducks developed into the iconic floating yellow figure with bright orange bill we recognize today. For many decades, most duck figures have been made of vinyl, but we still call them rubber ducks. Rubber ducks naturally inspire […]

Nintendo Game Boy

  Inducted Year: 2009 No video game platform did more to put gamers “on the go” than Nintendo Game Boy. And go they did—bringing their gaming experience to school, to summer camp, and to the back seat of the family automobile. Over the past three decades, Game Boy has become synonymous with portable gaming fun. Following the enormous success of their NES home console, Nintendo launched Game Boy in 1989 and the system became an instant hit. The secret to Game Boy’s success […]

Hot Wheels

  Inducted Year: 2011 In the 1960s, Elliot Handler, a cofounder of Mattel, Inc., envisioned a die-cast car to surpass the popular English Matchbox brand. He wanted a line of toy cars to dominate Mattel’s boys’ division just as its Barbie doll had become the strongest brand in its girls’ division. Handler insisted that the toy cars look authentic, so the project enlisted Harry Bradley, a top auto designer from Chevrolet, to lead the toy design team. What Handler really wanted was […]