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AMERICAN GAME CAPS (TM)
AGC AGC
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(TM) HEAVY METAL (TM)
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"The Story of POGs
From 'The Unofficial POG and Cap Players Handbook' by Jason Page

It all started in 1927 - the year the Haleakala Dairy in Maui, Hawaii, brought out a new brand of fruit juice. The top of each bottle had a small round cardboard lid or cap.
Times were hard in Hawaii - despite the warm sunshine, fabulous beaches and all the coconuts you could eat The 1930s were the years of the Great Depression. Thousands of people lost their jobs and they had no money to spend on new toys.
Children had to make their own games. And that's when the caps off the juice drinks caught someone's eye. Soon a game sprang up, invented entirely by children. The idea was to flip the bottle caps. These became known as POGs because the ingredients of the drink were Passion fruit, Orange and Guava.

The kids drew designs on the caps and also made slammers. These slammers were usually three caps glued together. They called them kinis - the Hawaiian word for 'king'.
The craze lasted a number of years but eventually faded away. It would probably have dissapeared forever if it hadn't been for a school teacher, Blossom Galbiso. She had played POGs with all her friends when she was growing up in the 1930s. In 1991 she decided to teach the game to the pupils in her class.

They loved it and told the others in the school, who told all their friends in other schools. Once again the whole of Hawaii was going mad for POGs. The game was bigger than ever before. In fact, by 1992 it was reckoned that the average child in Hawaii had a collection of 1,700 POGs.
In 1993 POGs flipped over to mainland America. First California, then one by one all the other states caught on to the craze. National tournaments were organised and other makes of caps were invented to cope with the demand.

POGs were launched in the UK at the beginning of 1995, and over 30 million caps have been sold here since. After about 1996 the cap craze started to die, which is a shame as it is such a great game. Maybe in another 70 years the game will be revived and start a massive craze again. Who knows?"
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