Salon.com > Toys

Digitizing classic games doesn’t always work

Thu, 10 Jan 2013 23:57:00 +0000

Last Wednesday, toymaker Hasbro announced it would be retiring one of the game pieces in the classic board game Monopoly, asking fans to vote on Facebook for which one of the game’s classic tokens -- the hat, the wheelbarrow, the scotty dog, the race car, the thimble, the battleship or the shoe -- they’d like to see replaced with a new game piece. The options for the new token, including a toy robot, a helicopter and a guitar, are intended to be "more representative of today's Monopoly players" than the old pieces, Hasbro vice president Eric Nyman told CNN.

Personal tech upends the toy market

Sun, 23 Dec 2012 19:49:00 +0000

Children have played with dolls for millenia. It was a good run.

Mattel is the maker of Barbie and Hot Wheels, but this year its top selling toy is a plastic cell phone case, according to the Financial Times (subscription required):

Whether a new Kindle Fire, or a hand-me-down iPad, analysts predict 2012 will be the year children as young as three-years-old will unwrap tablets at trendsetting rates. And that has the traditional toy companies scrambling to stay relevant.

“The top two guys, Mattel and Hasbro, they are terrified,” said Sean McGowan, managing director of equity research at Needham & Company, an investment banking firm. “They should be terrified, but the official party line is they’re not terrified.”

Weird news: Koreans clamoring for farting doll

Thu, 06 Sep 2012 21:40:00 +0000

Meet Kong Suni, the doll that eats, farts and can even defecate smiley yellow turds. She serves as a potty training ad for kids, costing between $22 and $30, and farts when you rub her belly.

Watch the commercial below:

via Huffington Post