If you’ve been playing electric football for years, you’ll remember the Dark Ages…The day your order was returned from 176 Johnson St…The day Tudor Games shut down.  Tudor was the only company still producing electric football at that time so it was a huge blow!  How do we get more figures, bases, quarterbacks or footballs?  This was the Dark Ages.

Our first fear was getting more bases!  We went to garage sales everywhere but had very little luck.  The internet didn’t exist for most people so we had to find a way to keep it going!  We even went to several plastic injection mold shops in Houston.  The cheapest quote we received was $40,000 just for the mold…And since we thought we were the only ones still playing (didn’t we all?) this just wasn’t possible.  Our only option was to dip into our retired players and add them back into the draft!

We had a precious few cotton/felt footballs that we were used to and we guarded them with our lives.  One day I noticed they were getting dirty from years (decades) of use so I soaked them overnight…In Bleach!  I thought the dog got into them the next morning when I woke up in horror to find our precious footballs were gone!  What do we do now?  Trips to fabric stores yielded nothing.  One day at the hardware store I found our solution!  Dremmel Tool polishing wheels!  We bought all they had and cut them into footballs!

Jersey numbers were another problem.  We were never satisfied with the numbers Tudor produced. Single color numbers that were mostly translucent just didn’t look realistic.  We tried to hand paint them but that was a disaster!  Our solution would come a few years down the line with ITZ’s first product…Outlined numbers.

Then one day Mark picked up a Christmas Catalogue and was shocked to see that a new company, Superior Toys, had purchased electric football!  The dark ages were over!!!

Please share your stories of how you survived the Dark Ages!