In the early 1960s, the toy inventor Burt Meyer went to an arcade in Chicago with his boss, Marvin Glass. One of them put a coin in a game that pitted two humanlike boxing figures trying to nail each other in the chin.
“We knew we had a great idea for a game kids would love,” Mr. Meyer told The Chicago Tribune in 2011.
He began to sculpt models of two fighters, the first phase in developing what would become Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots, which was first produced in 1964 and is still being made.
But he initially struggled to make the concept work.
“We were having trouble getting some realistic motion in it, which would allow the figures to fall over,” Mr. Meyer told Tim Walsh, who wrote the 2005 book “Timeless Toys: Classic Toys and the Playmakers Who Created Them.”
Then Mr. Glass shelved the project when a boxer, Davey Moore, died from a brain injury after a featherweight title fight against Sugar Ramos in 1963.
Mr. Meyer revived it, however. He changed the combatants from humans to robots — the Red Rocker and Blue Bomber — which made the violence feel less extreme.
“Obviously, they don’t fall over dead,” he recalled thinking when he was interviewed by the blog Deadspin in 2011. “Maybe their heads can pop up.”
In the final version, players control the robots’ lefts and rights by pressing buttons on joysticks. And if the jaw of one is hit dead-on, its spring-loaded head indeed pops up.
Mr. Meyer conceived a toy box full of fun during a quarter-century at Marvin Glass & Associates, a top toy designer, where he started in about 1960. He collaborated on other products, including Lite-Brite, which lets children create colorful pictures with plastic pegs that seem to glow; Mouse Trap, which lets players build a Rube Goldberg-like contraption; Toss Across, a play on tic-toe-toe; and Mr. Machine, a walking robot.
Glass’s creations were licensed to manufacturers such as Ideal, Mattel, Hasbro, Parker Brothers and Louis Marx and Company, which made Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots.
Mr. Meyer, whose license plate read TOYKING, died on Oct. 30 in a retirement community in Burr Ridge, Ill., southwest of Chicago, his son Steve said. He was 99.
Lite-Brite, Mr. Meyer’s favorite among his inventions, was a result of his encounter with a vast display of hundreds of lights at a building in Manhattan. Users press small, translucent colored pegs into a plastic grid of holes, which sits on a piece of black construction paper blocking an electric light source. As each peg perforates the paper, it lights up, bringing the patterns of the pegs to shining life.
Mr. Meyer devised the toy working with Mr. Glass and Harry Stan and then showed the prototype to Merrill Hassenfeld, the chief executive of Hasbro. Mr. Hassenfeld quickly agreed to a licensing deal to produce it.
“I dimmed the lights and plugged it in,” Mr. Meyer said in “Timeless Toys.” “After he tried it himself, he sat back and said, ‘That’s my item!’”
The Strong National Museum of Play, in Rochester, N.Y., which inducted Lite-Brite into its National Toy Hall of Fame in 2022, described it as “truly unique upon its introduction,” adding that it recalls “19th-century mosaic toys which provided colored marbles for children to arrange in pleasing patterns and shapes.”
Mr. Walsh, the author of “Timeless Toys,” estimated that at least 20 million Lite-Brites have been sold since 1967. Time magazine ranked it 55th on its list of the all-time greatest toys in 2011. Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots came in at No. 49.
Burton Carpenter Meyer was born on April 18, 1926, in Hinsdale, Ill. His father, John, was a pharmacist, and his mother, Esther (Carpenter) Meyer, ran the household.
After serving in the Navy from 1944 to 1946 as an aircraft mechanic, Mr. Meyer went to a pre-college prep school to expand his mechanical skills. He attended West Georgia College (now the University of West Georgia) for a year before moving to Chicago, where he graduated from the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology with a bachelor’s degree in product design in 1952.
He didn’t work for a year, until he was hired as a design director and teacher at the Atlanta Art Institute. He then worked at companies that made store and trade show displays, cabinets and jukeboxes.
“He did not know what he wanted to do until he landed at Marvin Glass,” Steve Meyer said in an interview.
It was an ideal job for someone with a lot of creativity, who brought an engineering background from the Navy and who could fix almost anything.
“There was a little mischievousness in him,” Mr. Walsh said in an interview. “He was joyful and playful, like a kid, and treated toy design as an art form.”
After leaving Marvin Glass in the mid-1980s — the company closed in 1988 — Mr. Meyer retired for a while, then started his own firm, Meyer/Glass Design. There, successful creations included the Pretty Pretty Princess board game; Catch Phrase, a word-guessing game; and Gooey Louie, which invited children to pick “gooeys” out of Louie’s nose. (Choosing the wrong one caused his head to open and his brain to fly out.)
In addition to inventing toys, Mr. Meyer was an adventurer who flew single-engine planes until he was in his late 80s; rode his bicycle on a 45-day solo trip from San Francisco to Charleston, S.C.; scuba-dived in Fiji and the Solomon Islands; and traveled to the North Pole for a 12-day, 135-mile trek when he was 69.
His son Steve was president of Meyer/Glass until it closed in 2006, but he continues to market some of its concepts. In addition to him, Mr. Meyer is survived by another son, Lee; a daughter, Sheryl Meyer; six grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren. His wife, Marcia (Kass) Meyer, died in 2001.
Some of Mr. Meyer’s inventions have survived — and thrived — into the digital age.
Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots appeared in the animated movie “Toy Story 2,” and Mattel produced a special edition with two of the film’s characters, Buzz Lightyear and his enemy, Emperor Zurg, recast as the combatants. The actor and producer Vin Diesel is planning to turn the game into a live-action film; in an Instagram post this year, he said it would be the “the testosterone-male answer to ‘Barbie.’”
Lite-Brite found its way into a 2022 episode of the Netflix series “Stranger Things,” set in the 1980s, with some of the young characters using the toy to communicate with friends who are stuck in an alternate universe called the Upside Down.
“We don’t know if things will last or fold,” Mr. Meyer told Deadspin. “There’s very few ways to tell.”
Richard Sandomir, an obituaries reporter, has been writing for The Times for more than three decades.
The post Burt Meyer, 99, Dies; Made Lite-Brite and Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots appeared first on New York Times.
