"Did your early fave toys foreshadow your current hobby?" Topic

I guess mine did. Before I discovered wargaming, both miniature and board, one of my favorite toys was Mattel's Switch N' Go. When I was 8 and 9 I got these two sets for presents:

Being able to drive tanks and shoot missiles with puffs of air was great fun. Of course I also had my share of the 12" GI Joes as well as a couple of knights with removable armor. I guess it was a foregone conclusion that once that certain comic book ad led to a subscription to Strategy and Tactics that my present condition was inevitable.

So did your pre-hobby toys lead you down this path or is gaming a new addiction.

Oh and a pre-emptive wave of my cane to the first idjit who says their early toys were Nintendo's Frogger or Missile Command!

Definitely. My toys are actually cooler, now.

My mom was really happy when my Uncle gave my brother and I a Marx playset castle with vikings and knights. It had a working catapult, a drawbridge and a plastic base that allowed you to fill the moat up with water.

Oh yeah. Castle-themed LEGOs for the win.

I had tonnes of plastic army men and vehicles which were all over the place in scale but I didn't care that much. I also had a military themed train set with a US Army railgun. Possibly my favourite toys of all time were Micronauts (no, not the GHQ ones). I was tickled when some of them show up full scale at the end of Time Bandits (the space ship one of them shows up in is from one of the Micronaut kits I had).

David S.

It was the front section of this toy:

David S.

I had GI Joes (the old 12" ones – not the crappy little 4" ones). I also had green plastic army men and I inherited a battle set in 1/72 that my brother wrote simple rules for and we used to have little battles with.

The WWII/Korea pattern 54mm Army Men certainly did impact my intry into the hobby. Image my surprise when I was walking through a Cure Park in southern Germany only to pass by a window that looked in upon a bunch of fellows pushing 25mm Napoleonics around. Spent the next 2 days of my leave playing with them.

Of course!

I still have this stuff!

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Vs Galactus?????????????

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I had wanted this but never got it.

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Yep.

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When I was 5, my brothers gave me a couple boxes of Airfix figures for Christmas – German infantry (the really old box, with all the Panzerschreks and Panzerfausts) and the Allied Paratrooper set (British uniforms, American guns). I've never given it up since.

Yep.

Absolutely.
I was a child in the 1960's: War toys galore!!!
Plastic army men, D-Day battle playsets, motorized Polaris submarines and Roman galleys, toy monsters and dinosaurs and aliens out the wazoo, exquisitely-detailed toy guns with realistic actions (Johnny Eagle being an especially wonderful line), and none of them painted in the curent ridicuously Politically Correct day-glo colors that assault the senses today.

Careful now, I have a lot of fond memories of the "crappy" 4in GI Joes; the 12in figures ceased to exist when I entered into the toy market.

There were 4 main toys I played with as a kid: Plastic army men, GI Joes, and Tranformers. There were a lot of Star Wars in there too. I remember my dad's friend suggesting I should mix my GI Joes and SW figures when playing. I was a bit put off from the suggestion (and thus it starts early…)

I was also a model builder for most of my life, starting out with snap-tites, graduating to glue-togethers a few years later. I never really stopped (girls were never a problem as I was too much of a geek; yes high school was a bad time for me…). Mix in that I started D&D in the mid '80s and I suppose there is no mistake I am where I am now…

Damon.

Soldiers , Gi Joes , model kits , Loved to read

Yup. Plastic soldiers, Helen of Toy games

Marx playsets, Timpo and Airfix figures.
Atlantic sets, 12in. G.I. Joes and Marx Best of the West figures too.

Major Matt Mason and gree armymen for me

My mother saved the clothes she brought me home from the hospital in. A jumper with printed yellow dinasours, a red elephant and a blue TANK!

I think this early influence has effected me for my whole life.

Oh, yeah! Got the Marx Civil War play set for Christmas one year early on and the die was cast. Still have my Roy Rogers western town, Marx Castle, and the Roman Galley (pressed into service for our LotR campaign). Lots of cheap plastic soldiers, model kits (planes, ships & tanks) and of course, loads of Airfix figures, most of which were bought with my own allowance/birthday $$. I can't remember getting, or playing with much else besides toy guns, plastic soldiers, and some of Dad's WW2 stuff as a child. Later it was historical miniatures, re-enactment gear, real weapons and militaria. Not much has changed!

Plastic army men and Lincoln Logs. Guns, lotsa guns. But the best thing my parents got me were books.

My earliest rememered toys were wooden soldiers and guns carved for me by Italian POWs. Not a lot else available till the war ended.

x42

Yes … then again, I discovered Charge! at the age of 10, so a childhood love of toy soldiers morphed seemlessly into historical wargaming (and my earliest wargames used my toy soldiers … it was some while before I bought specifically 'wargame' figures) …

Phil
(re terminology, a _wargamer, not a 'gamer' btw)

Yes, very much so. In fact, I think I'm still playing the same kind of games I made up myself in grammar school. We had a Woolworth's with the typical 1970s toy section-plastic dinos, Airfix figure sets, model tanks, planes, spaceships, etc. While I might be waxing nostalgic, it was a glorius time to be a kid. I could never understand the kids that either didn't have any interest in such toys/kits, or those who 'grew out of them' by the time they were 11 or 12. I'm sure they don't understand me either. Well, to each his own, as they say.

A big load of Britains Crusaders and Saracens and then some cowboys from a friend.

Interesting to see where all of the Star Wars Lego takes my son….

Yes!

Airfix soldiers and models, Micronauts, Star Wars, Transformers, Exin castles, Action Man … Enough to cause massive permanent damage to a young brain.

Green army men of various sizes and maufacturers, Britains, books, Matchbox toys (when they came in the matchbox)Lincoln Logs and Marx sets; yep, I was headed to this hobby from birth.

GI Joe, the 12" kind. Toy soldiers, plastic green and grey. Progressed to Airfix. Vehicles, soldiers, guns, planes. Early 25mm napoleonics. Then got into The Lord of the Rings just in time for Grenadier 25s. Then I went to 1:1 scale. Enlisted, that is.

Hmm
Read alot of mythology , folk tales, scifi and comics as a kid. Got dressed up as batman with stuff around the house.
Didn't actually start 'gaming' until I was about 30.
My mom was an avid Scrabble player though and my family used to play lots of Monopoly.

Other than stuffed toys, the first real present I remember was some painted 54mm horse-mounted "German" post-war border troops with slung carbines from a 50's trip my grandparents took to Germany…horses were made from some very tough and heavy stuff, maybe even metal, with short wires sticking up from the saddles, figures were some kind of paper-mache-ist composite and broke quite quickly.

Then painted 54mm?, maybe Elastolin?, French Napoleonic Imperial Guard Grenadiers in white plastic…the rest was Marx, followed by Battle Cry/Milton-Bradley. So yeah, definitely…

My friend had a huge collection of the 3.75" GI Joe line of toys. Unknowingly, when we'd set up all the toys in his basement, Joes vs Cobra, on tops of chairs and tables and shelves, and then commence to throwing the missles from tanks and making shooting noises we were playing a wargame, just without the benefit of an organized set of rules and dice! We each had an army, a battlefield with terrain (not unlike stacks of books and boxes that people use when starting out regular table top gaming), and we fought until our tanks were out of missiles and one side was declared the winner.

So yeah, toys were definitely a forshadowing of my hobby.

12" GI. Joes and LOTS of Star Wars toys…

It started one Christmas when my parents bought me both the Marx Fort Apache set and the Marx WWII Army men set, the one with the bunker, the artillery piece that would shoot, and the spring loaded flying helicopter.

What do you think? :)

12" G I Joes, Airfix figures, toy soldiers, plastic models.
LOTS and LOTS of books, many on the same areas of military history. Even then I knew that different folks had different information and ideas on things.

12" G I Joes, Airfix figures, toy soldiers, plastic models.
LOTS and LOTS of books, many on the same areas of military history.
The books I still all have, the toys are all gone. I cry myself to sleep thinking what if I had my Airfix men, hundreds of Green plastic Armymen, dozens and dozens of at least one of every German tank, Shermans, a 88mm artillery piece and others of 1-35 models. Maybe thats why now I have only D&D figures and 15mm Nap's

Yup. I used my allowance to buy multiples of gundam figures. To this day, I have 20 or so ground GMs.

I have had plastic army men since I was three, that's 1958. The oldest figures in my collection are MPC ring hand figures, and over the years I have picked up a few hundred of them.

By the early 1960's it was Giant of Hong Kong and Airfix figures, now it's thousands from all the 1/72nd scale and Roco in HO for the vehicles.

Mike "Bunkermeister" Creek
mediatealways.org
bunkermeister.blogspot.com
sgtsays.blogspot.com

Remco Walker Bulldog tanks, green army men, you think?

Long before me and my brother had ever heard of war games we had made our own. We used colored thumb tacks stuck into carbard to represent unit types and had all sorts rules for calvery and infantry etc.

I probably would never have learned about Wargames if it was not for the GW story in Katy Mills Mall, Texas. They had had an awesome looking red mech warrior model I later learned was called a Dreadnaught.