Whether it was you growing up in the ’90s or your kids, we’re about to give you a blast from the past and bring you Atomic Threads’ top 10 toys of the ’90s! Personally, most of us here have been reminiscing about the awesome fun we used to have with these things; but those of you out there who had to go on wild goose chases and dish out all your hard earned cash to avoid tantrums and guilt trips, might give a different reaction! Either way, we think you’ll all appreciate our countdown whether it makes you go ‘No way! I need one of those again!’ or ‘Oh god, not that junk!’.

10 || POGs

No ’90s home was complete without a floor scattered with these little discs! It was the simple but awesome game which involved stacking up some POGs face down against your mate’s stack, and throwing down a heavy slammer POG to see how many you could flip the right way up and swipe into your collection. Obviously if you were playing ‘for keeps’, this was grounds for day-long feuds between best friends, resulting in schools across the country quickly ruining our fun by banning them!

9 || Yo-Yos

There were always 2 kinds of kids – the ones who were total wizards at yo-yoing, who knew all the tricks and everybody watched in awe in the playground; and the ones who used to end up looking like a bruised, human ball of string after smacking themselves in the face with the light-up, brightly coloured hell wheels (you can probably guess which ones we were). Nevertheless, this didn’t stop us owning every new colour and style that was dangled in front of us!

8 || Inflatable Bags and Chairs

Okay, so we know these aren’t technically toys, but you can’t forget the hours of fun that were had with those chairs! Well, we say hours – we mean moments seeing as they usually burst within 3 minutes of playing Hot Lava or using them as wrestling props… You can’t really ignore the design flaws of the backpacks either; it’s pretty obvious that inflatables + sharp school equipment = wrinkly deflated sack. But, no matter how impractical they both were, you weren’t cool unless your bedroom/outfit wasn’t at least 30% inflatable!

7 || Super Soakers

Remember when we used to have a real summer, with real sun, and no rain?! The days when your summer holiday from school was pretty much just a 6 week water fight? Well those days wouldn’t have been possible without the presence of the God of all water pistols – the Super Soaker! The only downfall of these beasts was that you had to refill them every couple of minutes, because if you filled them to capacity they’d either pull you over, or you’d be totally pooped after chasing your mate 5 metres down the road!

6 || Hot Wheels

So, those of you who were parents in the ’90s will probably look at these and wince at the memory of constantly treading on them and going flying across the kitchen! Either that or you’ll feel like crying at the thought of how much money you forked out for all the new tracks and accessories they brought out what seemed like every week! But, we couldn’t have a ’90s toy countdown without them; we remember sneaking them into our school bags and spending all break time crashing them into walls and launching them over homemade jumps! It was all fun and games until one was accidentally propelled at the dinner lady =s

5 || Power Rangers Megazords

Basically, they were the ’90s answer to Transformers – except, to the relief of parents across the country, they weren’t a near-impossible puzzle to put together! These were probably one of the most awesome toys you could get at the time – you can’t really go wrong when you’re mixing mean animals, badass robots and uber-cool teens! Although, you were pretty stumped if you lost a part…

4 || Beanie Babies

So, by now we all thought we’d be millionaires after selling our ridiculous collection of Beanie Babies that we’ve lovingly had shoved in boxes for 15 years; when in reality we’d probably struggle to sell them for a quid each at a car boot sale! But, forgetting this harsh truth, we can’t forget the excitement that came over us when the weekend came and we got to spend our pocket money (and probably some reluctantly donated funds from other family members) on a new Beanie Baby.

3 || Pokémon Cards

You can’t think of the ’90s without remembering the international phenomenon, Pokémon! You couldn’t walk into a local shop, supermarket or toy shop without being bombarded with toys, cards and games featuring these weird Japanese ‘animals’; arguably the most popular of these being the Pokémon Trading Card Game. Kids in their millions around the world scrambled to get their hands on as many packs of these as they could, in hope of getting the most powerful cards to battle their friends with! Although, we’ve been having a little reminisce about them here at Atomic Threads, and it seems that not that many of us actually knew how to play, but instead just used to carry them round showing off how many ‘shineys’ we had! Totally worth the extortionate amount of money our parents spent in our opinion…

2 || Furbies

1998 saw the emergence of one of the first interactive ‘giga pets’ kids of the ’90s were able to go absolutely crazy for. These strange owl-like creatures retailed at around £24.99 and spoke complete gibberish (AKA Furbish) for the first couple of weeks you owned them – which when you’re 7 is a painfully long time to wait! But, once we’d gotten over that hurdle our Furbies had a vocabulary of about 200 English words – mostly showering us with phrases of praise and admiration! Unfortunately, the love was short-lived as most of them ended up in a dark cupboard after a few weeks, just to shut up their incessant cries to be ‘fed’ every 5 minutes.

1 || Tamagotchis 

And this is it – our #1 toy of the ’90s: the Tamagotchi! For the kids that weren’t allowed a pet or just couldn’t be bothered to look after the real thing, these egg-shaped pixelated pets were a god send! All you had to do was wait a few minutes for your animal to hatch, then look after it by feeding, disciplining and playing games with it; all done with just 3 buttons! Just like the Furbies above, these were another short lived craze as your pet could also die within half a day if you failed to tend to it – making school a bit of an obstacle! As a result they were banned in schools, causing sales to quickly decline. Although the makers (Bandai) came up with the solution of adding a pause option to the toy, it inevitably became old news and kids eventually moved on to better (and more pricey!) play-things…

So, now you’ve had a good old reminisce, it’s probably time to get in the loft and have a rummage for any ’90s toys that survived Mum’s clear-outs!