The history of toys

28:11First time I probably had to hold something to step on. Then one foot forward, one foot back, it started rotating. Then pretty soon I didn't have to think what I needed to do to rotate. I was floating around. You know, usually when you drive something, right, you have to push buttons, go forward, holding a handlebar or steering wheel with hoverboard very intuitively just moving. How did it feel? It felt great. It was kind of sensational. And who was the first person that you showed it to? My daughter. She loved it. And I think immediately I asked other people to try it too. And they all love it.

28:56Okay, so it doesn't actually fly off the ground like the hoverboard in Back to the Future 2. But the sensation for users is pretty similar. Shane knows he's on to a winner, but needs more money to bring it to market. After filing a patent to protect it from copycats, he seeks investment through a crowdfunding platform, and he makes a promotional vid. The Hover Tracks is built for fun and transport. You can use it at the park, to get around school, a warehouse, or even the airport. The idea behind the Hover Tracks is to create a fun product people can use every day, both indoors and out. It's an immediate hit.

29:35And with very little effort, Shane secures$200 ,000 for his creation, which he calls Hover Tracks. But there's a problem. When we show to the world, we have to explain how it works. Press your toes slightly downward to move forward. And press your heels backwards to move in the reverse. Move right or left, or even spin, by shifting your weight in the direction you want to turn. We showed details, drawings, everything on the Kickstarter. Because we already filed a patent, we felt everything should be safe. So we showed everything. And very soon, this whole concept was copied by a Chinese factory.

30:20So right after we started selling, they were selling too. Within a year, there are copies everywhere. Summer of 2015, there are so many knockout powerboards. They're sitting everywhere, even in the streets. Hi, Justin. Justin Bieber was seen riding one on his way to a recording studio. Social media feeds fill with celebrities trying out the craze, as you can hear on US show Inside Edition. Rapper Bow Wow told us he's fallen off his many times. I fell one time on set, right on set, filming CSI, hit the trash can. Slow motion, though, not speeding. It was just like a quick turn and then boom. There are problems, as CBS reports.

31:04Well, it's happened again. A mall in Texas had to be evacuated after this hoverboard exploded at a kiosk. Shoppers were afraid there was actually a shooter or even a bomb. And get this, the hoverboard was still in the box. Thankfully, no one was hurt. Well, not only are hoverboards catching fire, people are falling off and being rushed to the ER. A South Florida congressman tweeted a picture with his arm in a sling saying that he actually went to the ER after using his daughter's hoverboard. And even athletes are wiping out. Take a look at this baseball player losing his balance and the latest victim.

31:38Take a look there. Yes, that is Mike Tyson. What happens is because the knockoffs from China, they all try to compete with each other. Whoever can make a product cheaper will sell more. So they cut corners. Two things I noticed. One is the battery. It uses a very low-quality battery. That's why it caused fire, because when you overload the battery with high current, the battery couldn't handle it. It would start fire. Another issue? The motor doesn't have enough power to handle your weight, because the principle of the hoverboard is called auto-balancing, right? That means when you fall forward, the motor will speed up to catch you from falling.

32:23If the motor doesn't have that kind of power, it will fall, it will shut off. That's why there were so many people falling, hurt themselves. As well as eating into his profit margins, the counterfeits are damaging Shane's reputation. We were called and people sent us letters, a couple of letters actually from their lawyer. from court is trying to sue us, saying that your product caused fire. Then we wrote them back. That's not ours. It's no knockoff. Despite the disappointment at making so little money from his invention, Shane now looks back with pride that he created such a popular product. That means people like it.

33:08People like my inventions. That just gave me some courage to keep working on new inventions. because every time I'm sitting there quiet, my brain starts thinking. Non-stop, I couldn't help. Sometimes I couldn't sleep. So obviously that sometimes is a problem, I couldn't stop. He's also working on a new, updated hoverboard. Just for the money, just for the business, what if I just make a better one that's way better than the old one? I may have a chance to get people like this new one better than the old one to convince people to stop buying the old one, buy a new one. Shane Chen, inventor and entrepreneur, was speaking to Vicky Farncombe.

33:51Our next hit toy from times past is the Tamagotchi. It was a little digital gadget with a small screen showing what was meant to be an alien pet. The Tamagotchi owner's job was to keep the life form alive. It was first released in Japan in 1996 and almost 100 million was sold in more than 50 countries. Emily Uchida Finch has been speaking to the man behind the idea. The Tamagotchi is an egg-shaped computer game in cute coloured plastic. The first version has already sold out and its makers, Bandai, can't keep up with demand. First, a chick hatches from an egg. Then you can feed it either rice or cookies.

34:35When you clear up its droppings, it squeaks with delight. But if you don't press the right buttons, it dies of neglect. That was BBC News reporter Juliet Hindle reporting from Tokyo when the device first hit the shelves. And this is the man behind the device, the Japanese toy developer Akihiro Yokoi.

34:59I had no idea that tamagotchi would become so popular. It was a totally new type of toy, so I thought it either wouldn't sell at all, or there might be a few fans buying a few units. The way it became so popular was a huge surprise to me.

35:17It was released in Japan in November 1996, but the inspiration for the toy came much earlier, from Akihiro's childhood. I've loved animals from a very young age. I used to catch insects such as dragonflies, cicadas, frogs and fish. I loved keeping and looking after all kinds of animals. That's how I spent my childhood. What I found most exciting about having a pet wasn't just how cute they were, but the process of looking after them. For example, when looking after fish, you have to change the water often, give them the right food. but if you make one small mistake, they might end up dying. I wanted to include those tricky aspects of pet ownership in the toy I made.

36:13After graduating from university in 1977, Akihiro took a job designing toys for Bandai. But this career wasn't his first choice. Actually, I wanted to work at a bank, a trading company, or a distribution company, but they didn't want to hire me. It was by chance that I got a job at Bandai, which back then wasn't a particularly big company like it is now. From the start, I had a senior position in the planning and development department, which was a bit unusual, but perhaps they thought I had some talent in that field.

36:53Akihiro's first commercial hit was a toy in the shape of a cat's paw called Neko Nyambo. This sold one million units in Japan. But he wanted to strike out on his own and so created his own toy development company called Wiz. Coming up with a good idea for a toy isn't easy. We really struggled at first and I was under a lot of pressure because I had six employees. So for 10 years, we mostly focused on package design for toys and all kinds of work to keep ourselves afloat. But we never lost our desire to make innovative games. The 1990s was the end to Japan's bubble era, when the economy had started to decline after a boom in the 1980s.

37:41Lots of industries were struggling, including the toy industry. Bandai was performing quite badly and their sales were poor. They asked us to urgently come up with a new kind of toy and they gave us a big opportunity. I brought them five or six ideas and one of them was the Tamagotchi. Our first design was to have pet tropical fish, but these weren't very interesting. Neither were pet cats or dogs, so having imaginary animals was better.

38:19The imaginary pet they settled on was a one centimetre tall alien living within a 32 by 16 pixel LCD screen.

38:33In the game's first version, Tamagotchis hatched from eggs and over the course of a few days evolved into one of eight quirky characters depending on how well looked after they were. You could feed, play and clean your pets by pressing three tiny buttons. The most difficult to grow was Mamechi, a bear-like creature with large ears. Other characters included Oyajichi, who is named after and resembles a middle-aged man with a bald patch and a scraggly beard. During that time, cute or pretty characters weren't really popular among high school girls but what was popular was strange and ambiguous characters and because these characters were imaginary we could be creative in how they had to be looked after which made the game much more interesting I told Bandai that they should absolutely not include a pause or off button on the Tamagotchi because if you had the ability to pause the game, it would no longer be like looking after a real pet and it would become less interesting.

39:46The mid-1990s was the era of the electronic handheld game. You had the Ryza Game Boy, Tetris and Snake on mobile phones. And this new toy tapped into that popularity. Welcome to the lodge of the Tabagoksi. A freezing cold morning at a superstore in North London. More than 200 people are queuing outside. All they want is a bit of plastic that beeps. It's like a pad that you can have. The Tamagotchi has now sold almost 100 million units in over 50 countries. And despite being invented 30 years ago, Bandai, the Japanese toy manufacturer, is still releasing new versions of the game. I asked Akihiro what his secret is to creating a successful toy.

40:32Whenever I come up with a toy, I'm not picturing a child using it. The way children think is closer to adults than what most people assume. So unless you make a toy that adults find interesting, children won't enjoy it either. What I've found is that when a toy is designed just for children, it doesn't really sell. While Akihiro Yokoi and his company Wiz are now credited as the creators of the Tamagotchi, this wasn't always the case. A Bandai employee was initially given credit. The toy industry is a rather traditional industry, and because Bandai released the Tamagotchi, they wanted to take ownership of the idea, which is quite a traditional way of thinking.

41:18When the Tamagotchi started selling out, the media wanted to find out who came up with the toy. I didn't think the Tamagotchi would become quite so popular, so I told Bandai that they could say someone from inside their company came up with it. I also think they thought it'd be better received by the public if a woman was said to be behind its creation, but in reality, it was me and my colleagues at WIZ who came up with it. How did your life change after you invented the Tamagotchi?

41:54To put it simply, a lot of money started coming in and my life changed a lot. I had a lot more freedom. I was able to start making the toys I wanted to make and my life became a lot more comfortable. Akihiro Yokoi, inventor of the Tamagotchi, was speaking to Emily Uchida Finch in that Whistledown production for the BBC World Service. Finally, in our trawl through moments in the history of significant toys, it's just over 30 years since the brick game Jenga was introduced to the world at a department store in London. The blocks and the shaky towers they build have gone on to conquer the world. As Surya Ilango now tells us, Jenga was brought to market by a British designer, but with the idea from a game played in Africa.

42:4430-year-old British toy designer Leslie Scott is on the phone with Erwin Toy Limited. They want to acquire the licence to sell one of her games. The conversation was a bit tense. They told me that they really liked the game, they loved the game. They wanted to take the game, but they hated its name. It was going to be a deal-breaker. I just said, I cannot allow you to change the name. It's got to be Jenga. So how do you play it? It's a game that comprises 54 wooden blocks, all of the same size. And you stack these blocks three by three to create a tower. And then you take it in turns to remove a block from the tower and place it on top until such time as the tower falls over.

43:35And that's the end of the game. And how do you win? I think one of the interesting things that makes it different from most other games is that you can't win it. Ultimately, gravity will win. Leslie grew up in East Africa in a family that loved to play games. We are a fairly competitive family in the sense that any sort of gathering would end up often playing games around it. If we were eating olive pips, we would see who could spit the pip out furthest, that sort of thing. When she was 18, Leslie's family moved to Ghana. She and her siblings were always finding new ways to amuse themselves. My much younger brother had a set of blocks that he played with.

44:20They were offcuts from a sawmill in Ghana. They were rectangular blocks. And in playing with him, we turned this into a game, which we were sort of piling these blocks up. We were taking a block from there and then putting it on top. That was the first iteration. there was nothing about it that we sat saying we're going to design this game and take it to mark it was nothing like that it was just a sort of family family game when leslie finished school she decided to live in england she brought along a couple of boxes of her family's beloved brick game we're now talking about early 80s my boyfriend at the time had just graduated from Oxford and became a real tennis professional.

45:01He was running this court at Merton College, along with a couple of other real tennis professionals. They loved my brick game. They loved it so much that they asked Leslie to sort the entertainment for a fundraiser. I'd organised things like fire eaters and jugglers and I brought in the brick game. It wasn't supposed to be the centre of attention, but I think a lot of people afterwards, that was what they remembered more than anything else was the excitement around playing this brick game. Leslie began to realise just how unique it was. The penny began to drop when I realised that this doesn't exist as a game.

45:42I decided I was going to turn it into a game. And I thought, OK, I'm going to start a business, start my own company, I'm going to mass produce this game and put it on the market. To do that, Leslie needed money. I went to the bank, I convinced them, which is weird enough to start with, that I was going to make a fortune. I then needed some more money, so I borrowed from my boyfriend at the time. But worst of all, my mother underwrote a second loan I took out from the bank. The bank at that point needed a security against it, and it was my mother's house. The issue with that is that it really could have gone belly up.

46:17She would have had to sell her house in order to pay off this loan that I'd taken out. So the pressure was on. Leslie managed to find a local woodwork shop in the north of England to make the first hundred sets. And by January 1983, she was ready to launch at her first toy fair in London. I thought it was going incredibly well, but I didn't take a single order, not one order from that. People left me their calling cards. So after the show, I immediately start sort of following up with everybody. And one after another, all sorts of questions, which basically made me realise that if you have one product and you're an unknown company, retail outlets were absolutely not prepared to start opening an account with you.

46:59It wasn't worth their while. So she took their advice. I started designing other games and including them in my portfolio. I told people I was a games designer and then I got commissioned design games because there were not many professional games designers. So it was plugging away at doing that. For two years, Leslie continued to showcase the brick game at different toy stores and even travelled to America to find a buyer, but with no fortune. By this point, it was 1985 and video games were starting to take over the market. I was losing a lot of money on it at the time. It was becoming, my loans got bigger and bigger.

47:39I'd actually sold the house that I had. I actually had this car that I had repossessed. There was some sort of fairly tense moments where, but anyway, they had got to a point where I was quite more than interested in letting it go of myself and having a much bigger company behind it. But then, a stroke of luck. I got a message from my friend's brother. He was living in Canada and he asked if he could represent this game at a mall in Canada. and one of the key salespeople of a company called Irwin Toy, who were the biggest toy company in Canada at the time, saw the game, took the game back to the headquarters and things and they then expressed interest in taking the licence to produce Jenga.

48:34Let's go back to that tense phone call that Leslie talked about, where she says she's not going to change the game's name. They then said, OK, fine, we'll go with it. We'll call it Jenga. And I remember saying to them, one day when you say the word Jenga, it will mean my game. Owen Toy branded each block with the name Leslie had chosen and even created a catchy television advert with a jingle that went a little like this. You take a block from the bottom and you put it on top. You take a block from the middle and you put it on top. How you build a tower, you just don't stop. You gotta build that tower, putting blocks on top.

49:18Someone knocks it over, and that's when you stop. But you start all over, putting blocks on top. Great game, with a strange name. But why was Leslie so adamant to keep this unusual name?

49:35I was born and raised in East Africa, and I grew up speaking Swahili. and my mother had a dog at the time, which she called Cheza. And Cheza actually in Swahili means to play. And I thought, oh, that's a really good name for my game, but it's been taken, if you like, by the dog. The word kujenga is the verb to build in Swahili. And there was just something, the second week I was sort of working around that, it just seemed like a perfect name for it. Your mum must have been so relieved that she got to keep her house It makes my blood run cold that I was prepared to jeopardise her home and I actually think that if it had gone to that I can't imagine that any of my siblings would ever have spoken to me again I mean it was an appalling thing to do but I was incredibly lucky it worked out well and she not only didn't have to sell her house she was able to repay all the loans and everything So it was just very, very lucky.

50:39The timing of all of this was very lucky. Why I allowed it to happen, I can't explain. I mean, all I know is that now when my own two children, who are both in business, I would not dream of putting my house up as collateral against any loans that they were taking out. Surya Alango was talking to the British designer Leslie Scott about the origins of Jenga. Finally, in our trawl through some of the toys and games that have left their mark on history, a moment when the game of football was changed. In the 1990s, a new way to analyse professional matches was introduced. Tim O 'Callaghan has been hearing from the perhaps unlikely man behind Prozone.

51:23Now, the interview you're about to hear wasn't recorded in our World Service studio in Salford, but from... A stately home just outside of Leeds, which is in the north of England. I'm currently waiting to interview a man who is responsible for the start of a revolution in the way that we look at the game of football.

51:45Hi Tim, my name is Ram Mylbarganem. My job was to create a concept called Prozone way back in 1996. Ram takes me through a series of wood panelled rooms before we sit down in a meeting space called the Potting Shed. He didn't set out in his life to change football. He'd originally worked for the confectionery company Mars. But in the 1990s, he was trying to sell a Finnish brand of chair, which used sound technology to aid recovery and reduce injury risk to footballers. If you can imagine, it's 1996. Derby County has just got promoted to the premiership. They were looking for the 1 % that's going to give them the advantage.

52:31Ram isn't a natural football fan. He described himself as an accidental tourist in football. And when he first went to Derby, he couldn't believe how little data was used in a sport that means so much to so many people. Data and analytics had been a big part of his life at Mars, where they'd used it to help grow the business. So one of the first things that we did at Derby County was to build a communication room, which was called the ProZone room. And ProZone was short for Professional Zone. And this room effectively had some very comfortable chairs. Yep, those finished chairs that Ram was originally trying to flog.

53:11This was a space for manager Jim Smith and assistant Steve McLaren to brief the players on game strategy. But with a lack of data on how the players were performing readily available, Steve had to resort to a more analogue way of doing things. He had two video recorders. And in one recorder, he had last week's games. And he would then scan that video. And every time he saw something, he would stop it, cut it, and paste it onto the other video recorder. And I said to him, hey, how come you're doing that? Haven't you got something that sort of says, you know, go and find me all the corners or go and find me all the free kicks?

53:53He said, how am I going to do that? I said, I don't know, but it seems to be a sensible starting point. So he said, OK, smart fella, go find a way of doing it. So he did. The first thing we needed to do is to devise a methodology for grabbing the data. So the obvious step was to video the games and find a way to encode the game so that you can then identify elements that could make it functionally fit for purpose. So that was the first starting point. And that was, I suppose, relatively easy. Then we said, hang on a minute, if you are doing that, we might as well find a way to see where the players are.

54:38Where is he passing from? How can we get those coordinates right? We found by installing up to eight cameras in a stadium. We could get the cameras to coordinate in such a way. Every part of the pitch was covered by at least three cameras. And that way, if two guys were together in one view, going to another view, you could separate them. It was revolutionary because it showed every pass, every move, where the players were moving. We were the first to actually bring a 2D dimension to the game. The game was traditionally watched on 3D. And what we did was converted that to a 2D. So you now started saying spaces where the players should run and how they should move.

55:25So the whole concept was alien to most coaches. And so Prozone, a tool to allow football coaches to see every aspect of the game in a new way was born. Whilst it was revolutionary in footballing terms, the original technology wasn't. It was horrendously labour-intensive. We had a deck of eight video recorders and we developed it in such a way you hit one button and all eight had then started at the same time because they needed to be synchronised. And then we had a motorbike courier waiting at half-time when we ejected all the eight videos and he would run that videos into our Leeds office when we digitised the videos and then the second half videos would arrive.

56:15Things got easier when DVDs came along. So Ram had a product he believed worked and a big opportunity for the team presented itself when Derby's assistant manager Steve McLaren was headhunted by Manchester United. And Steve then insisted on taking us to United. Now all Ram had to do was convince them to sign up. But they said, Ram, we are Manchester United. We don't pay people, other people pay us. So at this time, we had Derby County, and they were in Memphis that they wouldn't pay. I couldn't afford to have another team that wouldn't pay either. Because, you know, the bank manager will only mortgage my house, the dogs, the cat and the kids for so long.

56:56So I came to an agreement saying, look, if you win anything, you'd pay us for the previous year and also sign a three-year contract. By the way, this was the 1999 season, which you might remember was a big year for Manchester United. So they won the treble. I was tempted to provide them with three invoices. But I didn't think I was going to get away with that. And that really led to the awareness of Prozone And probably the best example of that was when we did the game between Juventus and United. And we showed how Zidane played, how Davids played, how Insagi played. And they went to De La Lappi in Juventus, their old rounds, and beat Juventus to get to the final.

57:50The success at Manchester United led to other clubs in the Premier League and the rest of Europe knocking on Ram's door asking for help. But it was a team in the second division of English football called Bolton Wanderers, under manager Sam Allardyce, who really embraced the technology. So suddenly our fame started to spread and that's when we had a call from Sam. I'm going, you guys are in the next division, I'm not sure you can afford us. Anyway, I sent one of our guys over to do the presentation and came back and said, yeah, Sam wants it. You just need to send him a contract. And that was an amazing season because Sam really embraced it.

58:33And the guy who used it at Bolton was a guy called Phil Brown. And Phil really got on well with understanding ProZone, what it was capable of doing. And Sam and Phil had an amazing season. They got to the playoffs to play against Preston and Bolton won and got promoted to the Premiership, which was probably as big for us as Manchester United. Bolton used Prozone to become an established Premier League side in the 2000s, qualifying for the UEFA Cup on two occasions. As the business grew, it wasn't just football that wanted Rams help. So in 2001 we had a call from Clive Woodward said he wanted to work in rugby.

59:19England at that time was about fifth in the world ranking and Clive wanted to win the World Cup in 2003 and we developed a bespoke product for rugby and Clive credits us with helping him. I wouldn't say we did all the work but helping him structure the game to win that final. Ram Malwaganam, one of the unsung heroes behind many a sporting team's success. He sold Prozone in 2008 and has since worked on programmes to help football coaches understand the masses of data that is now available to them. He was speaking to Tim O 'Callaghan. And that signals the final whistle as we wrap up this edition of the History Hour looking at toys and games.

1:00:01We'll be back in the world of less frivolous moments from the past when we return next week. So until then, this is Max Pearson from all of us here. Thanks for listening. Goodbye.

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