Battling Tops

Background

The game was renamed Battling Spaceships in 1977 in response to Star Wars fever. After Ideal was sold in 1982, Marx took over the game. By the late 1980s, the game was out of production. In 2003, Mattel rereleased Battling Tops.

Origins & How the Game Works

Battling Tops entered the toy world in 1968, the brainchild of inventor Eddy Goldfarb and brought to shelves by the Ideal company. The core concept is deceptively simple: two to four players each wind a string—attached to a pull tab—around their spinning top, seat it in one of four launch positions on a circular concave arena, then yank the tab hard to send the top spinning into the center. The curved, bowl-shaped surface is the game's secret weapon, naturally funneling the tops toward one another so they collide and battle.

Victory goes to whoever keeps their top spinning the longest, with a slight edge given to players who can time and angle their launch with a touch of skill, even though the outcome remains largely unpredictable. Wins are tracked by sliding pegs into holes around the arena's rim, and the first player to rack up ten victories claims the match. Interestingly, the game shares a conceptual kinship with gasing pangkah, a traditional Malay spinning-top sport, suggesting the appeal of top combat stretches far beyond Western toy aisles.

Characters, Design & Player Customization

The original 1968 set introduced six personality-driven competitors, each given a playful name: Hurricane Hank, Twirling Tim, Dizzy Dan, Smarty Smitty, Super Sam, and Tricky Nicky. Though six tops shipped in the box, the arena's four launch slots meant only four could clash in any given round. Each top was built from an octagonal disc that slid over a ridged shaft, the shaft featuring a small notch designed to catch the winding string. A sheet of colored stickers accompanied the set, intended to dress the disc and shaft in matching hues—red, yellow, green, light blue, white, and orange for the standard six-player configuration.

Yet the design allowed for creative mixing: players could swap shafts, discs, and stickers freely, with the one caveat that the adhesive stickers could only be applied once. In a later revision, Smarty Smitty was swapped out for Cyclone Steve. The original 1968 run also included an eight-top variant adding Fighting Frank and Rocky Rocko, though that version used only four colors, creating four pairs.

A Bumpy Corporate Journey

Battling Tops has had a notably turbulent corporate life. Born under the Ideal brand in 1968, the game rode a wave of cultural enthusiasm in 1977 when it was rebranded as Battling Spaceships, a direct nod to the Star Wars craze sweeping the country. That rebranding, however, proved to be a brief interlude rather than a lasting transformation. In 1982, Ideal was sold, and the game passed into the hands of Marx, which continued producing it for a few more years.

By the late 1980s, the title had quietly disappeared from shelves, and for nearly two decades it existed only in the memories of children who had once yanked a pull tab in a plastic bowl. Then in 2003, Mattel stepped in with a fresh rerelease, reintroducing the concept to a new generation of players. The journey from Ideal to Marx to Mattel mirrors the broader reshuffling of the American toy industry during that era, and the game's survival through three different corporate owners speaks to the enduring appeal of its simple, competitive format.

Cultural Roots & Place in the Spinning-Top Lineage

Long before plastic tops and pull tabs, the fundamental idea of spinning-top combat had deep roots in Southeast Asian culture. Battling Tops bears a clear conceptual resemblance to gasing pangkah, a traditional Malay sport in which players battle spinning tops for supremacy. This parallel suggests that the game's inventor, Eddy Goldfarb, was tapping into a universal human fascination with kinetic competition that transcends any single culture or era.

In the modern toy landscape, Battling Tops occupies a similar niche to later phenomena like Beyblade and Battle Strikers, all of which center on launching spinning objects into a shared arena and letting physics decide the victor. What set Battling Tops apart in its 1968 debut was its deliberate embrace of unpredictability: the concave arena and the tops' collisions made each round feel like a small, chaotic event, where a flick of the wrist could tip the balance.

That blend of chance and marginal skill gave it a democratic, accessible quality that resonated with children and kept the game in rotation across three different manufacturers over more than three decades.