13 Comments
Aug 22Liked by Retroist

I forgot all about these, but yes I boughtthem as a child! Thanks for the memory.

Now I have Presto shrinky-dinks on the mind.

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My parents recently got a box of old cards (baseball, football, Star Wars and more). In this box I found a bunch of the old scratch off cards, played of course. Nice flashback memory of them. I can still smell the crumbs as I rubbed them off with a coin. Quarter preferred.

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This is great! I forgot about that scratch-off game! I saw that you have a podcast. Is that also on Substack?

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author

I do have a podcast. I post about the podcast here and you can find a list of the episode here:

https://www.retroist.com/p/retroist-podcast

You can also get to it via Podcast aggregators or via RSS at:

https://feed.podbean.com/retroist/feed.xml

If you decide to check it out, I hope you enjoy it.

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Thanks! I’d be interested to know why you don’t host the podcast from Substack directly. I used to use Podbean for Fifteen Minute Film Fanatics and liked it— I wasn’t sure whether to use it again for my current project or use Substack like I am now.

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I had the podcast before moving to Substack and wasn't sure about moving the whole show here since I wasn't familiar with Substacks's abilities with podcasting when they started hosting them.

I have since started another podcast, The Video Store Podcast, which is all on Substack, and I have really been impressed with how seamlessly it works.

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I never had the Pac-Man stickers but I did have Donkey Kong. I've been creating wax pack trading cards base on properties we never got and I would love to recreate something like this for some Atari 2600 games. I just need to figure out how to replicate the scratch of surface.

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Would love to see something from Pitfall! or Yar's Revenge. I never even though about how those scratch cards are made.

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Two of my favorites. I loved the box art for Yar's Revenge. As a kid I would make scratch offs with silver crayons. It worked ok but that's the extent of my experimentation.

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This unlocked a whole line of memories I'd forgotten. I hardly ever played Pac Man but had plenty of the merchandise, including these stickers I only now remembered.

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Pac-Mania was real. I loved collecting Pac merch back in the day. Still surprised that, even though we have gotten some fun new games and animation, that the Pac Franchise isn't bigger.

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These were stuck on every vertical surface in the early '80s. The depiction of Pac-Man with eyes and limbs in the display artwork added an interesting imaginative depiction to pair with the simplicity of the geometric arcade version. The ghosts got a little bit of character, too.

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The convenience store where I bought these had some video games, and a wall near the games that was a target for stickers. I remember seeing stickers on there that I needed for my collection and being sad I couldn't get them.

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