Furby

It talks, moves, learns and speaks Furbish. Furby was the strange little electronic creature everybody wanted for Christmas 1998.

What exactly is this thing? - It’s a Furby!

Big ears. Huge eyes. Covered in fur. It talked, moved, blinked and responded when you played with it. Was it an owl? A hamster? Some kind of little electronic alien? Nobody seemed quite sure. But in 1998, plenty of kids knew they wanted one for Christmas.

Furby came out of the box speaking Furbish, its own made-up language. Play with it and it gradually began using more English words, giving the impression that your Furby was actually learning how to talk. It could move its ears and mouth, open and close its eyes, respond to touch and even interact with other Furbies. News stories at the time reported that there was a surprisingly sophisticated electronic toy hiding underneath all that fur.

Then came Christmas 1998. Furby became another one of those toys that everyone had to have and seemed impossible to find. The normal retail price was around $30, but sold-out stores sent desperate shoppers to newspaper ads and the (new at that time) world of online auctions, where Furbies could sell for many times the regular price. Some especially hard-to-find Furbies reportedly sold online for extraordinary prices.

Furby has disappeared and returned in several generations since then, including their Furblet offspring, with newer electronics and more features. But it's pretty hard to recreate the experience of Christmas 1998, when parents were searching stores - and this relatively new thing called eBay - to try and find a fuzzy electronic creature that nobody could quite explain, but everybody wanted.