Article by Rathgar Jones

If you’ve invested all your money in pogs, I have bad news for you. The pog fad died out… like, a long time ago. And no, it’s not coming back. It’s never coming back. Pogs are as dead as any craze can be. The question is “why?” During the peak of their popularity they seemed poised to take over the world. Manufacturers produced the tiny cardboard disks by the millions, every recognizable pop culture icon from Homer Simpson to Batman had his face stamped on one, and kids in countries across the planet spent hours gambling with their favorite pieces. And yet pogs disappeared, seemingly all at once, never to return to the public consciousness again. As perplexing as the mystery might at first seem, I’ve actually just told you everything you need to know to figure it out. Let’s take a closer look.

Firstly, it’s important to remember that pogs isn’t just the name of the toys, it’s also the name of a game played with the toys. The game is simple, but challenging. Pogs are placed in a stack and each player takes turns using a modified piece called a slammer to attempt to knock the stack over. Any pogs that fall off and land face up now belong to that player. Repeat until everyone involved is pissed off.

The game of pogs existed for centuries before the fad took off, but we don’t need to go that far back. In fact, we only need to look as far as 1991. That’s the year that a Hawaiian schoolteacher named Blossom Galbiso introduced this game to her students as a way to teach them math skills and provide a nonviolent alternative to traditionally dangerous schoolyard activities. The children used milk and juice caps like those pictured above to play. Haleakala Dairy was the preferred brand (for no reason in particular) and the game was renamed as an acronym for the company’s juice options of passion fruit, orange juice, and guava juice. Taking note of this sudden popularity, Haleakala began printing designs on their caps.

By 1993 the game hit the continental United States, where it spread faster than anyone could have predicted. A man named Alan Rypinski saw a major business opportunity in the game, and grabbed the trademark for “pogs.” He created the World POG Federation and began producing pogs with images on them. Pictures based on pop culture were naturally the most popular, so this immediately became a defining feature of the toys. The details of how this little enterprise grew and spread are largely irrelevant to this discussion, but know that it DID grow and spread. Pogs were a true phenomenon that looked like it would last forever.

But it didn’t.

Now it’s time to answer the question we started with. What happened to pogs? If you’ve ever thought to ask the question before, and I don’t blame you if you haven’t, then you’ve likely heard a pretty straightforward answer. Schools banned them so the kids stopped playing. This is true, but it isn’t the whole story. Schools in several countries did ban pogs, citing concerns that the game was nothing more than simple gambling. What most people don’t realize is that pogs were more problematic than that. Not only were children growing upset over losing their beloved toys to better players, they were also swindling each other with bad trades and even robbing other players. Even when they weren’t practicing committing felonies, schoolchildren were often too distracted to focus on their education. Working out trades, arguing over who had the coolest collection, and admiring their own prized caps became such an important part of everyday life that many students completely abandoned actual schoolwork. There was also another problem; one built into the entire concept. Blossom Galbiso had taught the game to her students in order to keep them from roughhousing, but it had worked too well. Some parents and teachers now worried that the kids weren’t getting enough exercise, preferring to play with pogs rather than engage in healthy physical activity.

But school-wide bans don’t explain everything. Kids could still play in their spare time or in secrecy. Unfortunately, pogs fell victim to the biggest failure a burgeoning market could face: over-saturation. Pogs were everywhere. Comic shops, grocery stores, Happy Meals, cereal boxes, toy stores, mail-order catalogues… it was too much. Additionally, the fun of collecting the coolest images deteriorated when people realized it was impossible. Is Spider-man cooler than Charizard? Which is more valuable, a Sprite pog or one featuring Michael Jordon? Is it worth risking your Daffy Duck for a Coca-Cola or Megaman? There were just too many options to make strategic decisions, not to mention the fact that having a unique collection was meaningless when the sheer number of available pogs meant that everyone’s collection was equally unique.

Both of these problems contributed to the death of pogs, but sadly the biggest killer was something else entirely. See, pogs weren’t murdered at all. They committed suicide.

The game itself was broken. It relied on the idea that any given round could result in a massive upset. Kids only wanted to play because they had grand visions of defeating another player and taking his collection. The problem with that is it means most of the time half of the people playing were going to end the game less happy than when they started. Over time just about everyone suffered a major loss. The game was so competitive and the stakes were so high that many burnt out even before suffering a defeat. The anxiety simply wasn’t worth a handful of cardboard chips. The few who continued to play were rarely driven by enjoyment of the game so much as a burning desire to win at any cost. Once the playerbase was whittled down to just these players, not even they had fun anymore. Add in some spats about which slammers were fair game (some were made of metal or were extremely thick) and concerns about whether any given move was legal, and the game effectively killed itself.

Distributors of pogs slowly died off as well, driven out by all three issues. People were publicly protesting the game, competition was too fierce, and the players themselves were disillusioned with the game. Once Haleakala Dairy sued a handful of the remaining producers the rest pretty much bolted.

And so ended the reign of pogs. While it may have seemed like the little toy chips were going to someday rule the world, in truth the fad only lasted for about three years. Their global dominance is largely forgotten and the pogs themselves are mostly lost, having long ago been trashed or destroyed. Even now in our time of nostalgia they aren’t usually worth much and you’d likely be better off tossing yours than trying to sell them. Today they serve mostly as a cautionary tale; a story of how rapidly fads come and go. So next time you feel yourself getting swept up into The Next Big Thing, don’t forget what happened to pogs.

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