(My thanks to the person on eBay from whom I nicked the above picture)
- by Owen Morton
Two years on with this website and I haven’t even mentioned Pogs yet. What on earth is the matter with me? To be totally honest with you, I’d completely forgotten about them, though how I’d managed to do this, when they were such an important part of my life for most of the year 1996 (I think, though it could possibly have been 1995), I have no idea. Still, someone mentioned them the other day and suddenly all the memories came flooding back.
(My thanks to the person on eBay from whom I nicked the above picture)
For those of you who don’t know, Pogs were one of the most lucrative money-makers that marketers in the 90s came up with. Essentially, they were pointless little cardboard discs, each one with a different design on it. The object, obviously, was to collect the whole bloody set of them. I think there were sixty four Pogs in each series, and three series’ were released before they began to lose popularity (at which point Walkers crisps began to cash in on the act, releasing their Tazos, which were very similar to Pogs). Also involved were slightly thicker plastic discs, which were called Kinis, and I believe there were twelve of these available for each series.
Pogs could be purchased in packs of six cardboard discs and one Kini, which cost 99p. It goes without saying, of course, that you would be totally unaware of which Pogs would be in each pack, due to imaginative packaging. They could also be bought in packs of about twenty four, which cost £3.15, though in these you would be assured of some duplicates, and again it would not be possible before purchase to work out which ones you were going to get. Knowing how capitalistic ventures like this work, I would not be at all surprised to learn that some Pogs were much rarer than others (I didn’t collect Series 1, but in Series 2 it took me and my sister ages to acquire Number 46, and Number 25 was totally unobtainable), thus making it very difficult to get the full set without buying a hell of a lot more duplicates than you needed. Obviously, it was claimed that you could swap them with your friends, but this was dependent upon two conditions: firstly, that you had friends, which was always a little bit of a problem for me, and secondly, that you had friends who liked Pogs and moreover wanted the ones you had, which – considering the problems I had with the first of these conditions – was even more tricky.
Even though the obvious objective of Pogs was to gain money for the manufacturers, there had to be some kind of excuse, really, otherwise it wouldn’t have got past the drawing board. Or probably wouldn’t have anyway, though in this money-oriented world, one can never be sure. Therefore, Pogs were passed off as some form of game, the rules of which I will here explain as best I can remember them.
Everybody playing (there was no limit to the number of players, though it tended to get a little confusing with more than one) would stack their Pogs up in one pile in the middle of the playing surface. Then turns would be taken to bounce a Kini off the top of the pile. Any Pogs that flipped over as a result of this action would then belong to the person who threw the Kini. This would continue until there were no Pogs left on the pile. This was all very well if you were playing for “keeps”, since the Pogs you won in the game would be yours, and those you lost would be gone. All fine and good. If you were just playing a “friendly”, however, you would have to know which your Pogs were and reclaim them after the game was finished. Little children being what they are, this was the perfect opportunity to nick off with the Pogs needed to complete their collection. This is why the game was best played by yourself, or not at all.
My sister and I, being the co-operative creatures we are, decided that instead of acquiring two separate collections of Pogs, it would be best to pool our resources and have one big collection. We were always slow to catch on to crazes, me being terminally uncool (as I still am) and her being a little slow generally (just joking, Lizzie, in the event that you’re reading this, which I somehow doubt you are), so we entirely missed Series 1, but we had a pretty good go at Series 2, over the course of its general release acquiring all but the afore-mentioned Number 25. One of my sister’s friends had Number 25, as I recall, and all manner of attempts to get her to swap it were employed, but she never would, probably because all we had that we were willing to swap were the many duplicates that everybody had.
Me and my sister were, as well as being slow to catch on to things, slow to let them go, and this is the reason that we collected most of Series 3 of Pogs, which was released at a point when everybody normal had just realised that it was all a huge con and was refusing to buy them anymore. Lizzie and I were stupid enough to carry on buying them, thus wasting a lot more money – I don’t quite know where this money came from, because I’m fairly sure I didn’t have a steady income at the time. I definitely didn’t have a student loan, and I think this was in the period before pocket money, so how we could afford these Pogs is a mystery, which will probably never be solved, largely because neither I nor anyone else concerned can be bothered to work it out. However, our insistence on collecting Series 3 was probably a rather clever move, since – seeing as very few other people bothered – they’re probably now rather rare and would sell for more, if we’d achieved getting the full set, which I don’t think we did. Never mind.
And now it’s come to that oh so familiar point in the article where I can’t think of anything else remotely intelligent to write about my subject, so I’d better stop.