5 High-Tech Toys That Went Too Far, Too Fast
Pretty Much All Lootboxes
It’s easy to track how we got to the inescapable lootbox economy in video games, even ones aimed at notably younger audiences. Once you get them to download the game, how do you keep making money? “Well, you sell more stuff in the game!” Ok, but they just buy the things they want and then we can’t make any more money. “Well, then make it so you don’t choose what you buy, and you have to keep spending money to get random rewards!” Ok, well it sort of seems like we’re building gambling for children? “Uh… shut up.”
Sure, it might not be far off from those machines at the grocery store that spat out temporary tattoos for a quarter apiece, but it’s more like those machines if they cost a lot more than a quarter and if they’d secretly been installed in your bathroom and connected to your mom’s credit card without her permission. Apple, Google, and more are in the thick of lawsuits about the predatory nature of these microtransactions, and Epic Games & Fortnite have already settled a similar suit. Which they paid out… in Fortnite V-Bucks. That’ll show them!
Cap’n Crunch Whistle
For the last entry on this list, let’s flip the script on its head, and instead look at a thoroughly analog toy that ended up having huge tech consequences: a toy whistle from a box of Cap’n Crunch. The so-called Bo’Sun whistle was a simple plastic whistle. About as low-tech as a toy could go, something that could be sent back in a time-machine without raising many eyebrows. What was important was the tone that it played, specifically 2600Hz.
This specific tone, when played into a phone, perfectly emulated the tones used by service providers to handle long-distance phone calls. This technique, known as “phreaking”, was the discipline of some of the world’s first hackers. Weirdly, those same hackers breaking into cloud-connected toys today owe a debt of gratitude to a thoroughly offline tchotchke from the past.