Let me take you back to a time when the only thing that mattered was recess, and the single greatest existential crisis was losing your best slammer.
Yes, I’m talking about POGs. Those little cardboard discs that somehow captured the spirit of an entire generation while simultaneously being utterly useless.
If you were a kid in the mid-90s, POGs weren’t just a game; they were life. And if you weren’t a kid in the mid-90s, then I’m sorry, but you missed the last great cultural moment that wasn’t mediated by a smartphone.
POGs—officially known as milk caps—were the Pokémon cards of their day, only less collectible and infinitely more chaotic. They were named after a Hawaiian juice brand (Passionfruit-Orange-Guava, in case you were wondering) and somehow mutated into a nationwide craze where kids risked their reputations (and allowances) on games of skill, luck, and the occasional playground hustle.
You didn’t just own POGs; you lived them. Each one was a tiny canvas, emblazoned with everything from grinning skulls to holographic dragons to Bart Simpson flipping you off. If Lisa Frank and Hot Topic had a baby, it would’ve been a POG.
But let’s be real: the actual game made no sense. You stacked your POGs in a neat tower, slammed a heavier disc (the slammer) on top of them, and whatever POGs flipped over were yours.
It was part skill, part gambling, and part pure anarchy. And the stakes were high because POGs were played for keeps.
This was no casual pastime; it was social Darwinism in action. Losing your best holographic POG to the class bully wasn’t just embarrassing—it was catastrophic.
The beauty of POGs wasn’t in the gameplay, though. It was in the ritual. The endless trades at lunch. The thrill of unsealing a new pack and discovering the shiniest, most ridiculous designs.
The collective awe when someone brought out a metal slammer so heavy it might as well have been Thor’s hammer. POGs turned classrooms into stock exchanges, where the currency wasn’t dollars but the unspoken hierarchy of who had the coolest collection.
And then, like all great fads, POGs disappeared as quickly as they arrived. By the late 90s, they were relegated to shoeboxes in dusty attics, replaced by the digital dopamine of Tamagotchis and Nintendo 64. Teachers banned them. Parents dismissed them. Society moved on.
Yet, here we are, decades later, still talking about them. Why? Because POGs weren’t just a game.
They were a time capsule—a snapshot of a world where our biggest worry was finding a foil slammer, not global pandemics or student loans.
They remind us of a tactile, analog childhood, when joy could be found in a 3-inch stack of paper circles.
If you hold a POG today, you might feel ridiculous. But you might also feel 12 years old again. And isn’t that the point of nostalgia?
To remember what it felt like to be utterly absorbed in something meaningless—and in that meaninglessness, find everything?
