Why Do I Still Have My Matchbox Cars at 58?

 I'm a nostalgic guy, and have kept a few toys from my childhood. There are scattered parts and pieces of Micronauts, one small Lego spaceship, a few other minor things of sentimental value to me. This includes a small, officially branded carrying case with a few dozen Matchbox toy cars in it. Unlike my old Odyssey 2 videogames, none of these memorable trinkets of my youth that somehow survived are engaging to me now.

But there they sit, my Matchbox cars, on a high shelf in a closet, where they have been in the seven years since I moved to my current apartment. Before that, eleven years in storage at a previous apartment, eight years at another apartment, and so forth back through my past of many apartments I've lived in since leaving home forty years ago.

Once in awhile I do check on them, get them down, admire the craftsmanship, remember their old value to me and the times my friends and I had with them, and put them away. I never wanted to pass them along to a child in my family (I was smart enough to not have kids myself in our pre-collapse civilization), they certainly never will reach a meaningful collector value without their original boxes, they just...take up space.

In our youth, those cars, as well as the American made Hot Wheels toys, were a part of all of our lives. Each of us curated a collection and finding that one Matchbox that no one else had was always a win. 

They were cheap enough in cost that it was relatively easy to convince mom or dad to get you one when they dragged you along to go shopping for something else. One time, mom took me along to a craft store a few blocks away, a quaint basement store with a side entrance under the owner’s home. Sure enough, they had a few toys by the cash register and I got mom to buy me this beauty:

 I never had much in the way of those orange Hot Wheels tracks, but some of my friends did, and I would take my cars over to enjoy their elaborate racing setups. Those were good memories.

Our “peak Matchbox” times involved two small model cities we constructed to play with our cars. The first one was called Ourtown and was a spontaneous creation one day when we were hanging out in the far back scrap yard of Gledhill Road Machinery. The dirt was dry having not been rained on in awhile, but there was a small gully that was the width of a two lane Matchbox road.

We didn’t even have our cars there that day, but we brought them back later. Over a few weeks we expanded the roads, created our own “homes” out of the scrap around us, and made little roads signs using pieces of slate we had found, scratching names of places in them. It grew big enough to have a countryside and a second, smaller town, with the whole area becoming called Miniland.

It didn’t last very long, though, as someone from Gledhill ran a tractor over the area to cut down grass and weeds. Years later I had the thought to draw a map of Ourtown to the best of my memory:

Next came an indoor Miniland, built on the unused ping pong table in my folks’ basement, which rested atop a similarly unused and neglected pool table. We used construction paper to build shops and homes, roads and a bay with a dock. In the center of downtown I used a piece of poster board to create a massive skyscraper.

It was all pretty cool, but we were kids and got bored with it in a few weeks. I don’t remember getting any other Matchbox cars after that and we soon reached an age where our activities were more teenage in nature.

So the Matchbox cars went into the case and travelled with me from apartment to apartment, providing occasional reminders of the above memories, but something else too. 

Holding onto them is holding onto a small part of myself that, to this day, doesn’t want to grow up and hopes that my friends and I will gather again and play with those cars. It’s absurd and will never happen, but it’s there. Adult friendships are a lot different than childhood friendships and a part of me misses the simplicity of those bonds.

I can spare the closet space for the foreseeable future to hold onto that.

Here is the carrying case:

Here are a few of my favorites:

Parked in front of the open case, from left to right, we have: 

Commer Ice Cream Canteen

This is my oldest Matchbox, made a few years before I was even born it seems, and acquired as a hand me down toy, I think. There is no number or date on the bottom of it. It’s actually kind of creepy too because the little guy inside is oversized compared to the rest of the vehicle. His legs should be sticking out the bottom, Flintstones-style.

Racing Mini (Series No.29, 1970)

This early acquisition (I was four years old) was a personal favorite as I seemed to like small, zippy European cars. As an adult I had a few VW Beetles, but joy came during a trip to San Antonio a few years back when we got a real Mini Cooper as a rental car. 

Volks Dragon (No.37, 1971)

This red souped up VW Beetle became reality for me in the mid to late 1980s as my second VW Beetle of the era was a souped up, jacked up, near replica of this toy. Hot rod red with after market modifications including jacked up rear tires and a pair of badass Monza exhaust pipes. The Matchbox sat on the dash for awhile.

Cosmobile (No.88, 1975)

Competition with Hot Wheels was fierce back then, so things got weird, with Matchbox releasing some strange space-themed models with different colors of metal and amber-tinted windows. 

Rolls Royce Silver Shadow II (No.39, 1979)

This gorgeous toy features a silver finish with red interior, front doors that actually open, and tiny shock absorbers. It was one of two Matchbox cars that sat in the driveway of my home at indoor Miniland.

Porsche Turbo (No.3,1979)

This remains the pride of my collection and was the other car sitting in my driveway at indoor Miniland. If filthy rich money ever rains down on me, I’d track down a restored real life version of this car. The Matchbox sports a unique metallic root beer brown color with a dull yellow interior. My friends were able to find this Matchbox too, just not in this color.

Beaten: Indiana Jones and the Great Circle (Series)

 I've only ever played two Indiana Jones videogames, and I've beaten them both. The first was the masterful Raiders of the Lost Ark on the Atari VCS, when I figured out that the clock was actually moving and you had to be in the map room at the right time, just like the movie. After that I just never came across an Indy game in my decades of gaming across various hardware, but they kept making them.

The most recent one dropped into my lap - or more accurately, onto my pricey XBox Gamepass Ultimate Super Platinum thing, and seeing it was from trusted studio Machinegames, I decided to download it and see if it was as good as their Wolfenstein games.  It was better.

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle has been carefully crafted to be a videogame that feels very much like playing through an Indiana Jones movie. The look of everything, the music, the font used to introduce a new area, all are very authentic. As is the incredible voice talent they found to sound like Harrison Ford. Speaking of voice talent, the late Tony Todd put in one last performance here as the mysterious giant Locus, another perfect role for the horror movie legend.  It was kind of bittersweet knowing it was his last.

A break in at Marshall College sends Professor Jones on a journey to capture the thief, which in turn leads to a bigger mystery with another Nazi once again arrogant enough to try to use the power of God resting in some ancient device for evil ends. This seems to take place in the timeline, if one cares, after Raiders of the Lost Ark as it’s prize is mentioned once if I recall correctly.

The game plays in first person and while Indy can use guns and blast away at enemies, it clearly wants the player to be more Indy like and just whip and punch enemies. Shooting summons every guard in the area whereas a stealthy approach is better. With a few upgrades, the whip-punch combo works well, Whip an enemy to make them drop their weapon and stun them, then punch them repeatedly until they fall. There is a block option too, so some fisticuffs require finesse.

And since the enemies are fascists, it was timely fun just punching them over and over. By that I mean, in the game's larger areas, the respawn of enemies behind you means that all the backtracking one does requires clearing out areas repeatedly. I'd take it as a sign of our times rather than design intent that makes punching fascists the least tedious part of such a game.

The game's main areas are pretty large and deviously designed to require tons of exploration. Later in the game, the player gets the option to travel back to them to complete any unfinished business, a feature which encouraged me to do exactly that. I did not go for 100% but I was close.

There is lots of lore to collect and read, as well as a camera that didn’t exist in the 1930s because it somehow instanly puts the printed photos into your inventory. Indy uses the camera a lot as a puzzle solving tool, and for general sightseeing. Weirdly enough, he doesn’t use it during the endgame cutscene where some truly historic shit is happening.

There were some weird design quirks and a few glitches but the game autosaves frequently enough that this was not an issue. Enemy AI was a little dopey, too, sometimes missing obvious chances to detect me. Or was it actually truly accurate AI, as being a fascist does require an unbelievable degree of stupidity? I’d say in this America “You know who you are” to them, but they are also too stupid to know how stupid they are.

There are lots of great puzzles for Indy to solve and they are not too challenging, but are rewarding nonetheless. Truly each large region itself is a puzzle in and of itself to explore. Indy uses his whip to swing over pits and to pull on certain switches out of reach.

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is a complete joy of a game, authentic to fans of the character while fun for us few gamers who appreciate archaeology and punching fascists.