Oh how I sighed when I discovered this post on Boing Boing:

Whimsical nostalgia indeed. I owned a similar sort of motorbike-based game (Kickstart? Eddie Kidd? Google has failed me so far), which used a strip of red film, pulleys and gears to make a plastic motorbike jump barrels and crates (yes, crates, even then).

I improved things slightly by painting over the crates with Tippex to make the plastic motorbike jump double-decker buses. That worked well, so I tried to speed it up by fitting about five nine-volt batteries lashed together to form a sort of miniature nuclear power core.

Oddly enough, it didn’t work and Mr Kidd never rode again. A year later it was a blessed relief when the ZX81 came out and my half-baked attempts at game improvement were confined to software (POKEing and PEEKing a blocky 2-colour Sam Fox if I recall correctly).

Appreciate the time you live in, kids (sniff). You don’t know how easy you have it.

- Brian (@flackboy)