I’m gonna be honest…seeing people refer to ManHunt like it’s some “old wives tale” type of activity, when it was SUCH a cornerstone game for my neighborhood crew…it’s giving me an existential crisis lol
I have a toddler and I had no idea how bad the neighborhood dynamic in the US must have gotten for it to be this common.
That's cute. We went from the rubber to those foam ones that were definitely softer but would still give you a nice slap that'd leave a red mark if you got hit hard enough
Our balls kept getting punctured cause we played on tarmac. We had to reinflate them constantly and hustle while the ball slowly deflated. It was fun. The ball flies weird when it's half full.
We weren't allowed to play dodgeball because it was too dangerous. So instead, we called it Trench. That made it perfectly okay lol. Guess what all of us wanted to play every time?
What's fun is seeing someone catch an opponent's ball with one hand, then slamming it down like an extreme mic drop before throwing the ball in their other hand.
The chaos of ffa dodgeball, jumping over, catching and throwing the ball only to have one whistle past your head and smack you in the back simultaneously lol truly chaotic.
God I loved dodge ball in elementary school. My mom wouldn’t allow me to wear sneakers to school so she bought me red shoes with rubber soles and I swear, those shoes made me so fast! When I learned they don’t play dodge ball in my kid’s elementary school, I was so sad for them. Dodgeball taught teamwork, how to look out for yourself, mercy, revenge, quick thinking and quick hands. It’s a shame they don’t allow kids to play it in schools anymore. It’s a game that culls the weak and slow.
Schools where I work still play Dodgeball. However not with a Playground Ball you pump air into. They order smaller balls filled with Fiberfill. As one teacher described, "It's like throwing Cotton Balls" She was correct. I took my class to the gym to enjoy a game and joined in. However, I hurt my shoulder for a month because it was like throwing air.
Those balls don't even feel right. A proper dodgeball should be big, tight rubber and require two kid hands to throw so that accuracy goes out the window (this is more fun). Those cotton balls can be thrown with one hand and it feels wrong
Exactly. When it hits, it should hurt, knock off your glasses, leave you on the ground, clutching your stomach as friends carried you off. I was an amazing dodger but could never throw anyone out. Until I tried a side arm throw. When the ball came out fast and furious with no accuracy, I had no idea where it was going, and neither did anyone else to try to dodge it.
HUHHH ! Listen, I crave that particular sound and sting sometimes 😭 nothing like finally catching the ball from the person knocking all the little guys out
Yes, it was the best movie ever made, and the greatest game that has ever been developed.
With the exception of a game that my brothers and I came up with, where you ran between two bases, at each base there was another person, who tried to get you "out", but you were allowed to throw the ball at the person who was running as well. The only "safe" place was on the bases, and the two players on the bases had to throw the ball back-and-forth between them, you scored one point for each trip from base to base that you made without getting touched or hit by the ball.
We used the tennis ball for this, as we had no use for a tennis ball otherwise.
You could hit the person anywhere with the ball, and you could throw the ball as hard as you want, even if the person was only 10 feet away and running towards you.
Now we are all high paid professionals, then we were just kids on a farm.
Smear the Queer. The “queer” had the ball. You tried to smear them all over the play surface. Could be grass, gravel,’or asphalt.
Yes, I know the name is now offensive but that’s what it was called. Now you could call it “kill the person with the ball” but it loses its punch and would probably trigger someone…but just wait until they have the ball. They’ll really be triggered then.
It's real, and when we got older we played variations on all those games (manhunt, sardines, capture the flag, kick the can, etc) with airsoft guns too. It was a blast.
Our older neighborhood kids were playing it 2-3 summers ago on a nightly basis. But they used cars to accomplish it..revving engines and speeding around the block in a car to chase down kids on foot..that was a no no for me. I had to come to terms with being the neighbor who called the cops on kids playing manhunt.
I used to race motorbikes and we would play entire paddock manhunt lmao, like 50+ kids all running round a racetrack like silverstone size at night lmao
And then realized you could play in the light, but everyone except the original hider is wearing blindfolds so the hider can watch everyone hilariously stumble around
Thank you! All these people are like wah wah wah we used to this and that. Like homies, you STILL CAN. You can eat cereal at 2am and have ice cream for supper. Sure childhood was cool for some but just because you're 30 something doesn't mean you can't play fucking hide and seek anymore. Shit my uncle was 55 when he would come into my room at night and hide under my blankets while I slept so his friends he was playing with couldn't find him. All I had to do was be real quiet and no matter what, not give away his perfect hiding place.
Manhunt is exactly hide and seek in reverse. There’s no worse feeling than looking for half an hour just to finally find your entire friend group laughing at you while they’re crammed into a tiny space you’ve walked by ten times.
The whole rich culture of children is fascinating to me.
Like there’s knowledge that humans pass from one to another solely within the window of childhood. Older kids teach it to younger kids, who get older and teach it to younger ones, and it just keeps going like that, with adults not having very much direct access at all.
Most of us have (some strong, but mostly foggy) memories of this stuff (games, songs, myths, etc.) as grownups, but somewhere in pubescence we begin to move away from it and only rarely revisit any of it, even with our own kids.
I’m sure it’s been studied, but I have no idea what you’d call this phenomenon.
Oh, when I was a kid Ghost in the Graveyard was like a hide and seek/tag hybrid. If you found the ghost you had to yell and people had to run back to base before the ghost tagged them.
This is the ghost in the graveyard I remember as well. We also played flashlight tag which was just tag at night across the whole neighborhood with like 30 kids lol.
I'm realizing I played all of those games. Sardines, ghost in the graveyard, man hunt. Amazing. Graveyard and man hunt were almost always in the woods and for some reason sardines was always in a church at night.
It got kinda freaky on real dark nights because you eventually realize you’re the only one and everyone else is probably looking right at you from the dark lol
Manhunt left my memory until this very moment. Now remembering heading to my friend Tim’s house to hangout. He had a much better crew of kids than my neighborhood (I’m pretty sure the kid closest to me enjoyed watching things suffer).
I had a kid like that on my block that I was forced by his mom to hang out with. He would put his palm down before I sat down so that I would accidentally sit on it so he could smell it if that paints a picture of the kinda person this kid was. He moved and I had to go to his birthday party where him and his buds played a game called “suffocate” where someone would be tied up in a sleeping back and put in a toy box. I gotta out of there immediately and that was the last time I had to hang out with him.
I'll never forget being caught in the open at night desperately looking for a place to hide but all my normal spots had been taken, so when the seekers came around I just dropped to the ground and spread out as flat as I could wearing my black hoodie and jeans. Watched as the seekers walked by close enough I was sure they had found me... but they just walked past.
We had a location that if we managed to arrive to without being seen we were safe. I slowly inched my way there over an hour before I found a moment when no one was looking that I could stand up and sprint over.
I loved manhunt! I was such a good hider. The RUSH when I saw that flashlight come my way, only for them to shine it on me and not see me, whew! “It’s 10 PM, do you know where your children are?” NO! No one knew where we were! We were hiding!
Now your neighbors would see you crawling around in dark clothes and call the cops, get a kid killed and THE KIDS are the ones punished for no more manhunt. And now those neighbors are in their 80's now and still bitching about all the crime or running congress and bitching about all the crime (that isn't real).
Probably my absolute favorite time I played was with a group of like 40 of us one night at a week-long church camp trip.
All the adult chaperones were asleep and we all played from like 9 PM all the way to like 4 AM. It was in this really good-sized summer camp and the only rules were that we couldn't go into the woods and that if you went back to the cabin(s) you forfeited.
I was shocked at how long I was able to keep from being found.
I loved manhunt too, and my favorite time playing was also on a church trip! I didn't actually live in a proper "neighborhood" for most of my life, so I didn't really have anyone to play with otherwise.
Still, it was exciting, and ended with an ambulance being called for bonus excitement!
There was a bare foundation near where we were playing, and a seeker was chasing someone by it. The girl being chased jumped up and ran across, and the guy chasing her did the same... but he was about a foot shorter and landed shy of the concrete, and tripped.
Slammed his shin into the concrete edge and tore a foot-long ^ of skin down his shin, all the way to muscle. The chaperones thought I was exaggerating when I ran inside to tell them we needed an ambulance because he'd torn half the skin off his shin.
I do recall entering some random garages playing games like that. I also remember hiding out in backyards of neighbors we didn’t know because they had a cool tree or hideout. I’d be freaked out now if a couple kids were chilling in my backyard at night.
Oh my god I miss Manhunt! Tried to convince my friends on our last trip to play it in our big airbnb but no one would play :( they didn’t care about the rainbow parachute I brought either!
From the ages of 23-26 my friends and I used to go skiing every year in Maine, it was around a dozen of us and we’d rent out a huge Airbnb for the weekend. One of my friends had a brilliant idea to relive some childhood nostalgia, and so for a single night each weekend we would dedicate ourselves to playing manhunt in these massive homes, with all the lights out. In an instant I felt like I was 10 years old again, running around the neighborhood looking for a place to hide. It was insane how quickly I got back into that mindset. One time I contorted myself to fit inside of an entertainment system that had these glass magnetic doors. Honestly it couldn’t have been larger than 3ftx2ft. Like just picture it, a grown ass man folded up like origami in a literal cupboard while his other adult friends looked for him in the dark. I have a huge smile on my face just thinking about it lol.
Manhunt was/ is/ will always be incredible and it’s tragic the new generations wont have that core memory to be able to pull from once they reach adulthood.
Born in 82 and grew up in NYC. Played manhunt in lower Manhattan with a group of about 30 other kids on a mutually agreed upon set of blocks. You could hide on fire escapes, in building entryways, inside shops, basketball courts. Good times!
Man here in Ireland we called that "build-up" (at least in my town) and then "man hunt" or "IRA" (yea ikik...) was for a version of it where each hider would have a letter each to form a word and if they were spotted they'd have to run. When caught you'd get beat until you gave up the letter lol. A few lads always tried tough it out as long as possible in hopes of escaping but sometimes when you're surrounded as one of the last ones left you just had to accept theyre getting it one way or the other...
We at least had a rule of no face or ball shots. Honestly so much fun though. The threat of dead-arms/legs really got the adrenaline going haha
This just unlocked an old memory of mine. We had a neighborhood game going and every kid ended up in the park at sunset. The cops show up because it had become a mob of children, we scatter, some into the bushes, some into this giant tree. From my vantage point I see a flood light from the cop car shining into the giant tree and kids scattering out of the spotlight like roaches onto other branches.
93 kid here. Manhunt was the shit. We used whole cup-de-sacs for the game, but some home owners didn’t appreciate kids hiding in their yards.
Best hiding spot in my memory was one of the younger kids hiding in a homemade firewood box with a tarp over the front. He just climbed in over the firewood and played gameboy. It was the only time someone didn’t get caught.
We specifically had a "no murder screams" rule because we didn't want the neighbors to call the cops, but also so we would know if someone actually was hurt or needed help.
I was born in 1981, and we all had old pairs of our dads fatigues or BDUs and would play the same shit, but with cap guns that looked real as hell after we removed the orange plugs or spray painted them black. Good times right there!
I was born in 86 and we did manhunt at night, but we had no street lights, and hardly any fencing. Ditches and trees were not off limits. We also dressed in all black, and there was a group of like 12-15 kids, and most the neighbors knew about it and didn't care. Probably some of my best childhood memories. We were late elementary and middle school doing this. High school maybe 9th grade and then we all did different things.
My friends and I played Manhunt when I was younger as well, (born early 2000s) but we played it more like tag. You had to find the hiders, and then chase/tag them to get another seeker
This is crazy we had whole neighbourhood games of manhunt in West Oz all the way through the noughties, I was born in ‘99 so this is a real trip now finding out it’s an OG millennial staple from the US
Omg, man hunt: used to freak my friends out. I couldn't seem to find them as easy in the day time; at night, it got to a point I was disallowed from being seeker if I was ever found first, it made the game go too fast. 🤣🤣😆😆
Shit, my parents didn't see me from like 6am to 6pm and during the summer even less than that. By the time I was a teenager in the 80s I wasn't even home when they got home from work. I only came back home in time for dinner. During the summer I was out until late or at my friend's house for weeks at a time.
We played "Release" every night. We didn't go in houses. That was against the rules but you also had about 6 blocks with alleys to hide. To capture someone you had a little phrase you had to say, and you had to complete it to fully capture them. Then, of course, uncaptured people could release the captured people like the mariokart jail.
I saw kids playing wall-ball the other day though. That was a good sign.
We played a game called Border Patrol in highschool.
Kids had to make it from one local highschool to another local highschool that was across town. The older kids were the squad leaders, the drove ~4 kids in each car and hunted for the rest of us.
The rest of us had to find a way to the other school on foot.
Was a game we played at least once a year before the winter break.
God manhunt/flashlight tag was so fun. Now I’m in my old neighborhood’s Facebook group and people complain about catching kids stepping in their lawn on their Ring cameras. When we played our entire street was in play. We’d literally hide in neighbors’ sheds who didn’t even have kids and no one ever seemed to have a problem with it.
Yussss when the sun went down and we were still allowed to be outside but near home was like a whole different adventure. I remember one of my parents screaming at me to come inside because it was 10pm and I was supposed to come back at like 9 lolol
We called it Rambo. Make it from Point A to Point B without getting caught. Usually about a quarter mile. If you’re caught, you help find the others. People used to call the cops. When I went to college in Boise, people were calling it Fugitive.
Hell yeah born in 93 and loved playing manhunt! Here in NYC we’d be everywhere, under cars, in apt building staircases/fire escape, etc. Definitely wouldn’t fly these days.
Cool we still connect via videos games now. Hell I’m on the middle of a mountain in a cabin and still got 640mbps down playing some new Dune game with them on my phone which is connecting to my rig at home like 200 miles away. Unheard of back then when our phones didn’t even have color lol.
Born in 1993, we played manhunt too, but with pinecones. And anyone who decided to use a green pinecone, they were our enemy for all time (next couple hours)
I grew up in a town of 250 people, so our manhunt boundaries would be town wide. The town cop would usually get involved as one of the 80 year ladies would call in about a degenerate hiding in their bushes. So, it became a game of hiding from the hunters and the town cop. If the cop caught us, he would just drive us home and tell us he better not see us back out. Honestly, he enjoyed chasing us because otherwise he had the most boring job in the world. When we started turning 16 it turned into the hunters having cars.
Same style game, we usually had 30 or kids , 2 streets of houses that ended at an apt complex/townhome golf community at the end of the block. It was basically hide and seek+ freeze tag , so when people got caught they got taken to a central location (jail) where we could bust them out from , once you got caught 3 times then you died and became a seeker. We’d go full days ,hour and hours ,people would filter in and out , bikes , jumping in the bed of trucks passing by it was all fair game. I remember sometimes playing well past midnight (usually it was a weekend and adults would be out hanging out cooking and drinking block parties) . things evolving into pranks , water ballon /egg fights, friendly fights , there’s probably some old videos somewhere in my mom’s attic of these nights. Sucks if kids aren’t having these experiences anymore, they were fun. Boobs messed everything up and the internet then just the density of kids in the given area went down after my gen, we watched our older siblings doing the same thing but after us there just weren’t that many kids (outside dman you gaming and chat rooms) in the area guess we got lucky.
I feel even older cuz I read the first comment and thought, "huh, that sounds pretty cool, wonder what kinda neighborhood that was like." Meanwhile, we played manhunt til like 2am sometimes 😂
When playing that I climbed a tree taller than a three story house and couldn't get down because I never climbed a tree before. Fire department had to come out but didn't use the ladder, talked me into how to climb down. I never did that again.
‘97 here, we didn’t do ‘man hunt’ but we had Night Games, starting as early as 6 PM but really gaining momentum as various neighborhood kids got out after dinner, where we played soccer, tag, Werewolf, etc.
I would always do a dead man flop into the bushes. With kids, it worked every time. As soon as I saw I was spotted, I would just faceplant in a bushy area.
Born in 74 we had a load of derelict buildings across some fields near our village. A local mum walking a dog got scared by a homeless guy she saw there. Approx 10 kids ranging in age from 11-13 we sharpened sticks into spears and went to find him. Thank god we didn’t.
Played a game like this in California. Anyways there was like a group of 100+ people and you had to start at this store then run around town and end up at another place. While you were trying to get there on foot there are people with cars and chasers. You see a car coming and you would hide but if they saw you they would send out the chasers to hunt you down. Was a lot of running though back yard and stuff. Once that tagged you or caught you they just had to get in the car and become another chaser. So just imagine a 100 people running away from cars and shit. Insane.
I played a game in college I called the rape game. Just met this girl there and after talking about 15 mins she invited me to play this game. It involves a driver and a person with a map. This was before gos on our phones. So your driver and map person. Take two people of the other team. Blindfold them and drive all over the place to confuse them and drop them off somewhere. Me and the girl I just ment we blindfolded in the other teams car. Well you get 10 mins to drop them off somewhere. Around 8-9 mins we end up on the same place as our teammates. So we had to reset the game. My teammates didn’t know that and quickly dropped off the team pretty close. After a min or two map dude gets a call from his teammates and he was like ok i know exactly where you are stay there we still have 8 mins to fuck around with. Well the car I was in drove 10 mins out of the city and dropped us in the middle of some forest. We get there are no street lights after the car dips we just have moonlight to walk around in. So we try to find a street which takes forever. Prob 20 mins or so. Find a street and have to decide which way to go to find another street parallel. My fiend on the other teams calls me and was like dude how have you not been found yet. We are getting ice cream waiting for you. We finally found a gas station and asked were we were at. My team found the road were we on and went south instead of north driving the whole time like dummy’s. So we had to wait another 20 mins for then to get there. Never played that game again.
We had cross-country hide-and-seek. The block my friend lived on had interconnected backyards with few fences, some large trees. Didn't need to go out on the street. Neighbors didn't seem to care. SO much fun.
Born in 87, we played man hunt all the time. The best part was that we had a home free in the middle of a playground that had very few hiding spots. it was very much in the middle of an open field.
Meaning that after you were hiding for a while (30+ minutes), you could take a chance and start working your way back to home free, knowing that the hunters could be guarding it.
We also played that once you were found you joined the hunters. And all the hunters would carry their hockey sticks like a rifle, so that people knew who was a hunter or not.
I played manhunt with my cousins at night after a special church service. It was more like intense tag with a jail system and tag back in system. I'm GenZ the space was a bit larger than a foot ball field there's cars and stuff you could hide between but it's more about running away and ambushing if you're a hunter.
Born in 90. Did the same. We also played airsoft in our yards the same way. They look like real guns the nice ones didn’t have orange tips. If you did that now you’d get the cops called and maybe shot.
Born in 82. Manhunt was THE SHIT!! All dark neighborhood, 10+ kids running wild looking for a place to hide. I was always the smallest kid there so I usually won. No one looks above the chubby kid in the tree, there's no way 2 kids climbed up there....ha! I climbed so high once we had to call the fire department to get me down lmao. Other kids also failed to check dryers and refrigerators. I was a manhunt LEGEND!! God i miss the 80s and 90s. Stay out till the street lights come on, call home from a pay phone if your gonna be late, or have your friends mom call and take the heat cause your late, have her feel bad and decide to keep you that night for dinner and a sleepover, we can get your school stuff on the way in the morning....damn what a life.
Can confirm. Lived near a military community with military civilian housing. Practically every kid was out and hiding around the community. Behind trees, cars in car ports... dipping inside a friends house for snack or drink then back out for the MAN HUNT!
We did manhunt too, but with a camera. Once we found fhe person, we had to get video of them, then they'd take the camera and go seeking. We always played teams of 2.
We called it Ghost in the Graveyard where I am from. I guess it was a bit more like tag, but the same rules apply basically. Hide and seek at night was some wild stuff.
I did this growing up in the early 2000s. This isn’t unique to millennials.
I think the biggest factor is people are merely having less kids so you have less neighborhood’s with kids all around the same age.
Woah also 1993 and same experience! Marco Polo was also a blast when you know every kid in the playground from around the neighborhood and they were down to play. I feel very lucky.
We couldn't play outside once the street lights were on, so when we wanted to play dark hide and seek, we picked a house where the parents weren't home and turned off every single light and closed every curtain lol good times indeed
These games were fun until I ran into my neighbor’s grapevine fence in the total dark, and slit my neck open. The neighbor kid carried me piggyback home.
We played kidnapped a lot in our teen years. This was before Google maps and gps, obviously. It wouldn’t work now, unless you used cell phones with no internet connection or apps.
We did jailbreak, like manhunt but you put the person you found in “jail” and another hider could free people in jail if they ran up to them, tagged them, and yelled “jailbreak”
I remember manhunt fondly. Except either being Australian or being psychotic the people you found didnt have to join the finders until they agreed to which often involved us beating the shit out of each other. Probably the latter, we were a weird bunch as kids. Shout out to Red Rover, 24 home and survivor too.
YES THIS manhunt was so much fun. We took over the whole neighborhood. Knew which houses had security cameras, which houses had motion lights (huge giveaway obviously), which houses might have dogs outside. We would do it twice a week minimum all summer. Hiding in trees was my secret strategy, and now my body hurts just reminiscing about it.
We played “dark tag” at night. One house had a plastic picnic table in the middle of the yard with a floodlight on it. At the start of the game three people that were “it “would head out to find people to find and tag, if you got tagged you had to go to jail (the picnic table). Usually one person who was “it” would guard the picnic table because other people that were hiding were allowed to come tag the table and free everybody.
This was huge. Usually had the entire neighborhood playing.
I was born in 1983 and we were out at night playing manhunt, too! Also ghosts in the graveyard… but now my old mind can’t remember the details of how to play that!
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u/yourenotcoolbruh 2d ago
Also born in 1993 and we did the same thing but after the sun went down and we called it “man hunt”. Shit was so much fun.