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The ultimate Nickelodeon dream: win a timed sprint through a toy store and keep everything you can throw in the cart. A few frantic minutes of grabbing toys off shelves — the single most desirable sweepstakes a '90s kid could imagine.
In the Toys "R" Us video-game aisle, you didn't grab the cartridge — you pulled a paper ticket from a plastic pouch under the box art, paid at the register, and traded the receipt at a counter window for the actual game. It was loss prevention that accidentally let you see exactly how many copies were left.
A plastic cone with a snorkel mouthpiece that let kids shout at each other underwater from fifteen feet away, invented in 1996 by an eleven-year-old from Moraga, California, who couldn't tell his dad about the fish while they snorkeled in Hawaii. He pitched Toys "R" Us from a fish tank, got an order for nearly 50,000, and sold the company at thirteen.