Oh man! I wanted Santa to bring me one of these but I never got one.

Damn Santa to hell!

Nah, I can't get into it. My Lite-Brite had square and triangular pegs; this one's just not the same.

I made this.

Make it, email it to yourself, copy link from email here.

They don't make it very easy to post these pictures do they?

If there is no risk of blinding yourself by catching the laser-like glare of a 60-watt bulb at the wrong angle from a vacated peghole, what's the fun?

God, it's just as frustrating as it was when I was a kid! I always used those heavy black construction paper stencils, you know - the ones that showed you where to put the pegs?

I've seen crazy Lite Brite creations made by one of my friends in high school, so I know it can be done, but I never had the patience.

God, it's just as frustrating as it was when I was a kid!

No kidding! The web designers have done an excellent job replicating the maddening annoyance of fumbling with hundreds of tiny, fiddly plastic pegs, painstakingly attempting to create some recognizable pixellated image that is destined to exist only temporarily.

I have a theory that the games of the 70s may have made my generation crazy. I mean, Lite-Brite; here's an experience that allows you to know the misery of Sisyphus. You spend hours creating a painstaking work of art, only to witness the kid next door's ability to destroy your creative effort tearing it all off with one rip of the paper. Then there's Operation (yipes! It takes a very steady hand!), Perfection (panic, sweat, faster! faster! time's running out!), Stay Alive (eep! It's that simple, life and death, you lose and you're a little marble swallowed by the earth) Sorry (work your arse off to get all the way around the board, then have your 'friend' gleefully sliiiiide you back to where you began)...all games designed to really lay on the pressure to perform. Yeesh! No wonder we wanted to be slackers, after that stressful a childhood.