h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Well, I had Lego, and Barbie. My friends and I used to dress one Barbie all in pink - the bad Barbie - and one in normal clothes - the good Barbie. Then we'd play out the conversion of bad Barbie... It took me a while to learn to use a pogo stick and stilts, but I loved them. I went through a dollhouse phase, and an American Girl doll phase (I had Molly and Samantha).

One game that lasted longer than any others was the simplest: 'rocks'. My friends and I would find pebbles, scratch out houses for them in the dirt, find them beds and cooking bowls of acorn caps and nutshells, and food of nuts and berries. At first it was just playing house; then we all read the Brian Jacques 'Redwall' series, and they became abbies with characters from the series. That ran for about three and a half years. A less popular variation, played indoors, was 'buttons'. And this was in the nineties, when two of us had video game systems!

The computer was a good toy, too. I had Sierra games - Pepper's Inventions in Time, Mixed-Up Fairy Tales - and later Myst, which took me and my mother about 8 months and a cheat book to beat. I had a Game Boy, but never used it much after my mother started to play it.