Pogs

The game's family tree runs deeper than the 90s: it descends from menko, a Japanese disc-flipping game played since the Edo period, by way of Hawaiian children who had been playing with milk-bottle caps since the 1920s and 30s. In 1991, teacher Blossom Galbiso revived the game at Waialua Elementary on Oʻahu as a nonviolent playground alternative, working it into her fifth-grade curriculum. The name came from POG, a Passionfruit-Orange-Guava juice from Haleakala Dairy whose bottle caps kids played with.

By 1993 the game had jumped to the mainland and gone supernova. Entrepreneur Alan Rypinski (of Armor All fame) bought the POG trademark from Haleakala Dairy in September 1993 and founded the World POG Federation—complete with a mascot, Pogman—which hit over $25 million in sales within about 18 months, while "pog" went generic, Kleenex-style, for every brand of milk cap. Gameplay was ruthless: stack the caps face-down, hurl the heavier slammer, keep what lands face-up. Playing "for keeps" meant your collection was genuinely at stake, and the slammers themselves—brass heavies, holographic foils—became a collecting culture of their own.

That keepsies economy was the fad's undoing. Schools in the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, Sweden, Germany, and Iceland banned pogs as kid-sized gambling that sparked recess scuffles. The fad collapsed as suddenly as it had erupted—by 1997 even major manufacturer Canada Games had gone under—leaving binders of tubes and caps in closets across the millennial world.