The Bop It Was Built to Break You

The toy yelled at you in your own house.

Not a beep. Not a chime. A voice. A man's voice, recorded in a studio in 1996 by an actor whose name nobody knows and who probably also did regional radio commercials, barking three short imperatives at a child sitting on a beige carpet.

BOP IT.

You bopped it. The big yellow button in the middle. You hit it with your palm. The toy made a satisfied boing.

TWIST IT.

You grabbed the orange knob on the left and twisted. Half a turn. The toy clicked. A little electronic flourish.

PULL IT.

You yanked the green handle on the right. It made a sound like a small accordion.

BOP IT.

You bopped it.

TWIST IT TWIST IT TWIST IT.

You... twisted, three times, and the third time you knew, somewhere behind your eyes, that you were not going to make it. There was a half second where the next command had not yet arrived and you were already losing. The voice spoke. You did the wrong thing.

A descending three-note raspberry. Wah-wah-waaah. You scored 14. You handed it to your sister.

The Object

It was about a foot long. Teal and yellow and orange plastic, molded into a vaguely organic shape that looked like a cross between a banana and a kazoo. There were three input zones - a button, a twist knob, a pull tab - and they were positioned just far enough apart that you couldn't reach all three with one hand. You had to actually use both hands, which was the whole point. Some kids developed a grip where the toy was clamped under one arm and they used both palms like it was an instrument. Other kids held it out in front of them like a steering wheel and got demolished.

It ran on three AA batteries housed in a compartment that you could only open with a Phillips head screwdriver, because the manufacturer had correctly assumed that without a screw, every nine-year-old in America would lose access to the batteries within six hours.

A foot of plastic that yelled three commands at children, designed by Hasbro engineers who knew exactly what they were doing.

The voice came from a small speaker grill near the top of the toy. It was loud. It was unreasonably loud. It was the kind of loud that, if you turned the toy on at 11pm in your bedroom, your mom heard it from the kitchen. The toy did not have a volume knob. The toy had two settings: off, and the entire house knows you are playing with the Bop It.

The Three Commands

That was the original ruleset. Three actions, three voice prompts, escalating speed.

Bop It was the satisfying one. You hit the button with your palm, like a buzzer at a game show. There was a thwack feel to it that made it the easiest of the three. It was also the most likely to get bopped accidentally by your knee, your elbow, your forehead at three in the morning when you fell asleep playing with it.

Twist It was the precision one. You had to grab the knob and rotate it at least 90 degrees. Less than that and the sensor wouldn't register. The knob also had a tendency, after about six months of play, to spin too freely, and you'd twist it and the toy wouldn't notice and you'd be looking at the toy thinking I twisted it while it played the failure sound.

Pull It was the dangerous one. You yanked the green handle out about an inch and let go and it snapped back. Easy enough. But because it was the only command that involved pulling, your brain treated it as the default panic action. When you forgot what the voice had said, when the commands started coming faster than you could parse, you would pull it. You'd pull it on a Bop. You'd pull it on a Twist. The handle would fly out and you'd hear wah-wah-waaah and you'd realize, with a small sick lurch, that you'd panic-pulled.

The Pull It was the action you reverted to under stress. It was the toy's most honest feedback about your character.

The Speed Curve

Here is what made the Bop It diabolical, as a piece of game design. The interval between commands shortened.

Your first command came after a generous two-second pause. BOP IT. Easy. Done. Next command, slightly faster. TWIST IT. Still easy. By score 10, the gaps were shrinking visibly. By score 25, the voice had no breathing room - it was firing the next command before the boing of your last action had finished. By score 40, the toy was speaking in run-on sentences. BOPITTWISTITPULLITBOPIT. By score 50, which I have to take on faith because I never made it past 47, I assume the toy was simply emitting one continuous syllable and you were either keeping up or you were already losing.

The ramp was brutal. The ramp was the point. You were not playing the Bop It to win. You were playing the Bop It to find your ceiling, which was a number between 18 and maybe 35, and once you found that number you spent the next three weeks trying to break it, and you would, occasionally, but never on purpose. You'd hit a 41 once and never know why and never hit it again.

You were not playing the Bop It to win. You were playing the Bop It to find your ceiling, and once you did, you spent three weeks trying to break it.

There was no save state. There was no profile. The high score on the toy was whatever the last person played to. There was no high score, technically. There was just what you remembered, and your memory of your high score got worse as the years went on, until you were telling people you'd hit a 60, which is not a number that humans can hit on the original Bop It without cheating.

The Cheating

There was, of course, cheating. The most elegant method involved holding the toy face down, against a couch cushion, and rapidly bopping/twisting/pulling all three controls in a rolling pattern with both hands - a kind of arpeggio. The toy would call a command and one of your three rolling actions would happen to be the right one, and you'd score. This worked, sort of, until about score 12, when the speed exceeded your hand-roll rate and you crashed.

The truly dedicated cheater put the toy in their lap and used the back of their hand for Bop It, while their other hand stayed parked on the Twist knob. This let you cover two of the three actions at all times. You'd still die on Pull It, but you'd live longer. A neighbor kid claimed he had a 70-something using this technique. He could not reproduce it on demand. We did not believe him.

The most desperate cheating involved unplugging the speaker. If you popped open the battery compartment and disconnected the wire to the small speaker grill, the toy still kept playing - it just couldn't tell you what to do. You'd be sitting in silence, watching the toy buzz a tiny LED, mashing buttons at random. This was less cheating than it was having a small breakdown. We tried it once. It was bleak.

The Voice

Let's talk about the voice.

The original Bop It voice belonged to a man whose name does not appear on the toy, the box, the manual, or the patent. He was credited only by Hasbro's internal documentation. His delivery was specific. He was not menacing - he was encouraging, in the way a coach is encouraging when he's also pretty sure you're about to fumble the ball. BOP IT, he said, with the affirmative confidence of someone who knew you could do it. TWIST IT, slightly louder, like he'd just remembered there was a deadline. PULL IT, with a kind of warning behind it, like I'm going to need this from you faster next time.

When you failed, his tone changed. Wah-wah-waaah, the descending raspberry, but also sometimes a small spoken phrase. Aw, man. Try again. That's tough. The toy was disappointed in you, but kindly. The toy was your dad, in 1997, watching you strike out at Little League, and saying that's okay buddy in a way that made it clear it was not, in fact, okay.

When you scored well, the toy congratulated you. Yeah! Bop it baby! You got it! These phrases hit differently coming from a foot of plastic. You were a child. You were being praised by a robot. You were, briefly, in love with the robot.

You were a child. You were being praised by a robot. You were, briefly, in love with the robot.

The Family Dynamics

Bop It was a one-player game. Bop It was always played in front of an audience.

A round of Bop It in 1997 looked like this. Kid in living room with toy. Sibling on couch, watching. Other sibling in doorway, also watching. Dad pretending to read a magazine but actually watching. Mom in the kitchen yelling turn it down please but secretly listening. The kid is going. Bop. Twist. Pull. Bop. Bop. The audience holds its breath. Twist. Pull. The audience starts cheering. Bop bop twist pull - Wah-wah-waaah. Score: 23. The audience exhales in disappointment. Sibling demands the toy. Kid clutches the toy. One more try. Kid plays again. Score: 19. Sibling again demands the toy. Kid hands it over. Sibling scores 31. Kid is furious. Kid leaves the room. Mom yells take turns please. Magazine turns a page.

This happened in every house in America. The Bop It was not a toy. The Bop It was a tournament you ran against your own family in a single evening, after which somebody was always upset.

The Disappearance

Bop It is still made. You can buy one right now. It does not haunt American living rooms anymore.

What changed wasn't the toy. The toy is, as far as I can tell, mechanically the same. The voice has been re-recorded. The plastic has been re-molded. The commands have proliferated and then settled back to three. The thing on the shelf at Target is recognizably a Bop It and would, presumably, still entertain a child for an afternoon.

What's gone is the position the toy occupied in the room. The Bop It was a living room toy. It was loud, single-player, and required everyone else to either pay attention or leave. It existed in the same space as the TV and the landline and your mom's chair, and it asserted itself against all of them, and won. There is no equivalent now because that room doesn't exist the same way. The kid is on a tablet, in headphones, in a different room, against a friend who lives in another state, on a game that doesn't yell.

I found a Bop It at a thrift store last year. Five dollars. Some other kid's, originally. The yellow button was scuffed. The green handle had been pulled too hard at some point in 2003 and the spring inside was tired. I put in three AA batteries from a kitchen drawer. I turned it on.

BOP IT.

The voice was the same voice. Twenty-eight years on, the same recording. The same encouraging timbre. BOP IT, said the man in the studio, the one who is now somewhere in his sixties, who has done thousands of voice gigs since, who probably does not remember this one.

I bopped it.

I made it to 24. I lost on a panic-pull.

The toy played its three-note descending raspberry. I sat on the floor, holding a foot of plastic, surprisingly defeated. Then I started a new round and made it to 31. Then 19. Then 27. Then I put it down. The voice does what it always did. It tells you what to do, faster than you can do it, until you fail. Then it asks if you want to try again.

You always do.