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Aaah, now here's a classy game of skill. Or, in fact, make that blind panic and frantic arm waving! If there was ever a game designed to warn children about the self-inflicted ailment now known as RSI (repetitive strain injury) then Hungry Hungry Hippos was it.However, physical pain was never enough to stop children playing - in fact, it made us play more. After all, Hungry Hungry Hippos wasn't so much about seeing who could feed their hippo the most, but rather who's wrist held out the longest (which in the end meant the same thing). No one wanted to be the kid who wimped out before the end citing a limp wrist as the reason. No way! But back to the game at hand. Hungry Hungry Hippos, which was produced in 1978 by Milton Bradley, consisted of a plastic moulded dish-like board with various nooks and crannies. On each of its sides nestled a plastic moulded hippo - one green, one yelloe, one pink and finally and orange one. The most unnatural thing about these hippos (as if their colouring wasn't enough), were the black levers sticking out of their rear ends. Once the gamesmaster had emptied the hippo food (small, round, white balls) into the centre of the board, each player then had to push frantically on his or hippo's lever in order to make the hippo open and close its mouth as the balls of food rolled near it. The aim was to grab as many balls as possible, and they'd roll through the hippo's mouth and into a collecting trough. Predictably enough, the person with the most balls won.There was, like most children's games, no real element of skill involved (maybe that's why Homer from The Simpsons TV programme likes playing it so much). It's all about luck. One commentator in the New York Times provided the perfect description: "The object of the game is essentially to press your handle down again and again as fast as you can, with no rhythm, no timing, just slam-slam-slam as your hippo surges out to grab marble after marble from the game surface." A game of Hungry Hungry Hippos invariably lasted, at the most, one whole minute, consisting of a blur of rainbow colours and more than a whiff of greediness. Seeing as hippos are not generously covered in most school syllabuses, a many kids of the 90s did indeed grow up believing that real-life hippopotamuses existed on a diet resembling white marbles. Just as they grew up believing monkeys lived in barrels and you could clear your room of bed bugs using a simple pair of tweezers. Perhaps the only realistic thing kids discovered about hippos from playing the game was their natural instinct for survival of the fittest. And is there any more valuable lesson than that?
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