Found it on google, but I had never heard of cocoleavio and I lived in Nevada, Upstate NY, MD, Northern and Southern Cali, and MO during elementary school years.

Speaking of games and moving around, I played 'dodgeball', 'greek dodgeball', and 'roman dodgeball' is different areas.

Regarding neighbors - yeah, kids don't play outside on their own like they used to and neighbors probably don't know each other as much, but our kids and neighbor kids played in each other's back yards. We had a hole in our fence for the kids. Most backyards in Cali are fenced and have been for a long time, so there's not the backyard freedom that there is in other parts of the country.

We used to play manhunt in the entire neighborhood. We'd hide on roofs, in cars, under cars, under decks, in sheds and in the bushes in front of houses.

When we got older(12-14) a bunch of us would camp out in a friend's back yard and play late at night after midnight. Some of the stuff we did would get you shot now.

The bedroom picture reminded me of something else. Everyone had at least 1 room in their house with wood paneling. Other than a storage room in my parent's basement I don't know of anyone else that still has it.

We used to run through and play in every yard and driveway on the block. The street I grew up on was baby boomer heaven (or hell?) depending on your definition. Every single house on the block was full of kids. Hell, every block was full of kids. You just don't see masses of kids running around outside like back in those days. There just aren't near as many kids now and they aren't running around playing outside anymore.

My neighborhood is def. an exception to this. The place is crawling with kids, both on my street, hanging out at the elementary school down the street, and from the large military housing on the next street over.

Kids still play in backyards, come home when the street lights come on, get disciplined by any adult in the neighborhood, ride bikes, build jumps, get skinned knees, set up lemonade stands, the whole bit.

We played bike wars - we'd choose up sides all week at school and tie colored streamers to the the backs of our bikes. Saturday morning it was on. Kids would be flying everywhere in the neighborhood trying to get the other team's streamers off their bikes. We'd have 100-200 kids playing. There were crashes, collisions, skinned knees, road rash and all kinds of mayhem. Games would last all weekend.

My room had Star Wars and NFL posters all over the walls.

Starwars... we're the same age dom

Nice stuff in this thread. I never realized how old some of you are.
I was going to mention the vibrating football game that took up hours of our time and was worthless as hell but we still liked it, but I just checked and that darn thing it is still selling.

I was in grad school. I'm an old fart.

I was a safety patrol boy when I was in the sixth grade, 1967. The kids that walked to school had 3 or 4 designated places where they had to cross busy streets on their way to and from school. The police would stop traffic and we had a cane pole about ten feet long with a red fabric sign with stop emblazoned on it that we would hold across the road. There was probably fifteen or twenty of us and would took turns before and after school. For our reward, when school let out for the summer, they took us in the school bus to St Louis where we spent a couple of nights and went to Grant's Farm and a couple of Cardinal games. They didnt put us up in a nice hotel. They didnt even put us up in a cheap hotel. We stayed in the downtown St Louis YMCA. I'll never forget the sign in the lobby when we checked in, Rooms $2 a night. They wasn't a TV or telephone. There wasn't even a bathroom in the room. There was one communal bathroom at the end of the hall on every floor. "It's fun to stay at the YMCA." About the only other thing I remember was when we went to Grant's Farm we were to meet back at the school bus at a certain time. A big fat kid named Jimmy was a few minutes late. For punishment the principal had him run through a belt line. Where the boys lined up in two parallel lines while he ran the gauntlet and the boys hit him with their belts. Probably grounds for a million dollar lawsuit today.

Yeah, we would play Kick The Can and such, and boundaries would be "from this neighbor's front yard to that neighbor's back yard," and this would cover a couple blocks. We and our parents had no qualms about this whatsoever, and nobody ever once complained. If kids were to do this now, someone would probably end up calling the police or releasing the hounds. And we used to come up with some hiding places that would now be considered pretty invasive to our neighbors' privacy -- in their bushes, behind their sheds, in their flower beds, etc.

wow, seriously? I luved that vibrating football game though. The passing and kicking was lol, the ball always would fly 3 feet off of the board. So I only did running plays and had a rule you always had to go for it on 4th down.

also loved this as a kid:



I remember I got this for Christmas the year it came out (1978?) and played it endlessly. The new passing feature was a big deal at the time!

Yes! I played the **** out of that game.

Mattel was for basketball



For football it was Coleco all the way

I received the vibrating football game for Christmas when I was a kid and loved it. Until our Boxer stepped on it. After that it was a real challenge to play, but my parents thought it was still good enough for me and my friends.

Also got one of those as a Christmas gift, probably 45 years ago. Had no idea they still made them.

We had these gaming systems but they didn't control my life. I played outside a lot more than I did with the consoles.






My outdoor happy fun playtime ended when this damn thing came out.

I <3 Intellivision.

Yeah we used to run through our neighbors' yards all the time. One night a bunch of kids were playing hide and seek or something across several yards. Pretty unfamiliar territory since it was another street but I was running almost full speed through a backyard (very dark night - new moon possibly) and literally got clotheslined. I didn't see the line at all but my right cheek bone smashed into it and my legs just kept going and I landed entirely on my back and had a huge purple bruise under my eye for a few days. lol. Just kept playing. Kids these days would sue.

I just sold an Atari 2600 new in box (Heavy Sixer unit made in sunnyvale) earlier this year.

How much did you make?

that sold for 1500... eBay.

it only went that high because it was an unopened Heavy Sixer, otherwise you can't give those things away.

This probably happened to a lot of us from that era. Same scenario for me but I caught the line in my mouth and ripped the braces off of 5 or 6 teeth.

Bias ply tires only lasted about 15,000 miles. You had to change the oil in your car every 3,000 miles or it would turn into tar.