Kerplunk Was Named After the Sound of Losing

The tube was yellow. Not a friendly yellow. A specific translucent industrial yellow, like the plastic gas can in the garage. It stood about eighteen inches tall on a black four-legged base that always wobbled. The tube had two rings of tiny holes around its middle. Each ring had thirty-two holes, and the two rings did not line up on purpose. That was the whole trick.

You threaded thin colored plastic sticks through the holes at random angles, making a diagonal lattice inside the tube. Then you dumped a bag of marbles in the top. The marbles landed on the sticks. The sticks held the marbles. You took turns pulling one stick out at a time. Whoever's turn caused the fewest marbles to fall through the tube won.

The bottom of the tube, when a marble came down, made a kerplunk.

That was the name.

The Object

Kerplunk came in a rectangular box with a photograph of two clean children on it. The children were laughing. In the picture the marbles were suspended, mid-fall, like the box was a physics diagram. Nobody in the actual world played Kerplunk while laughing. In the actual world you played it holding your breath.

Inside the box: the tube in two halves that snapped together at a seam. The black base with four legs that snapped into the tube. A ziploc bag of thirty-two sticks, thin and stiff and about seven inches long, in five or six colors of translucent plastic. A muslin drawstring bag of thirty-two glass marbles. An instruction sheet nobody read.

The marbles were the good part. They were solid glass, real glass, heavier than they looked. Cat's-eye pattern in the middle, that swirl of colored glass suspended in clear. Some had chipped edges from previous years. One was always slightly different from the others - larger, or a completely different color, or oddly opaque - because someone in your family had lost one and replaced it with a marble from a different set. Every Kerplunk set eventually had an immigrant marble.

Every Kerplunk set eventually had an immigrant marble. Slightly the wrong size. Slightly the wrong color. Nobody remembered how it got there.

The Setup

The setup was half the game.

You held the tube upright with one hand and started feeding sticks through the holes with the other. The holes were small enough that you had to aim. The sticks were flexible enough to bend a little if you pushed too hard. You wove them at whatever angles pleased you - crossing, parallel, layered - until the inside of the tube looked like a nest.

Some kids built cathedrals in there. Sticks crossing at every angle, four or five layers deep, engineered to catch anything. Some kids built a lazy X of six sticks and called it a day. The house always agreed, before the marbles went in, that the setup was fair. Nobody ever agreed on what fair meant.

Then you tipped the marbles in from the top. This was the second sound in the game, and it was a good one - thirty-two glass marbles clattering into a plastic tube, landing on plastic sticks, settling. It sounded like weather. It sounded like the game was ready.

You held the tube up to the light and looked at the marbles suspended in there and you thought, briefly, that this was a beautiful object. A little snow globe with a mechanical soul. And then somebody said whose turn is it and the whole thing became a war.

The Game

The rules, as stated on the sheet nobody read:

• Take turns pulling one stick out of the tube.
• Any marbles that fall through the sticks and land in the base are yours.
• Fewest marbles at the end wins.

The rules, as we played them:

• If you pull the stick and no marbles fall, you glow with a kind of physical relief that no adult activity has ever replicated.
• If you pull the stick and one marble falls, you say a swear word under your breath and pretend you meant to.
• If you pull the stick and six marbles fall in a cascade, you laugh a small hysterical laugh and the other kids laugh too and someone probably knocks the whole tube over.

The strategy was supposed to be that you looked at the tube, figured out which sticks were bearing weight and which weren't, and pulled the load-bearing sticks last. This is the strategy the box implied. This is what the children in the box photo were doing, apparently, mid-laugh.

The box implied strategy. The tube offered chance. The gap between the two was where Kerplunk actually lived.

The tube did not actually reward strategy. You could pull the stick you were sure was doing nothing and half a shelf of marbles would come with it, because the marble on top was resting on the marble below, which was resting on a marble jammed against the wall, which was actually being held up by the stick you just yanked. The whole thing was chained together in ways you couldn't see. You could pull the scariest-looking stick in the middle of the tube and nothing would happen at all, because a marble had gotten stuck against another marble at a lucky angle two inches above it. There was no way to know.

The Sound

The sound was the whole point. It's in the name and it was in the room.

When a marble fell, it didn't just drop. It bounced off two sticks on the way down, so there were three sounds - tick, tick, ker-plunk - and the plunk was the one that hit you. That was a marble in the base. That was a marble on your side of the ledger. That was one point of losing.

If two marbles fell in a row it was kerplunk-kerplunk. If a cascade happened it was that noise turned into a rattle, six or eight glass marbles pinging off each other in the base, and everyone at the table saying oh, oh, oh, oh.

The absence of the sound was also a sound. You'd pull a stick, wait a full second - the whole table waiting with you - and no marble would move. The silence had a shape. It meant you were safe. You'd hand the tube to the next kid and start breathing again.

The Physics Nobody Explained

You know what Kerplunk was, in retrospect? It was a demonstration of load-bearing structural failure with a party dressed on top of it.

Every marble in the tube was doing physics you couldn't see. Some were fully supported by sticks. Some were resting on other marbles that were supported by sticks. Some were wedged against the wall by pure friction. Pull a support that isn't the one you thought was doing the work, and a chain reaction propagates upward through the whole thing in a fraction of a second. This is exactly how a Jenga tower falls. It's how a scaffold collapses. It's how a wooden pallet gives out at a warehouse. It's why buildings need engineers.

We were playing at, with a straight face, the little parlor version of a real thing that hurts real people. The sticks were plastic. The marbles were glass. The stakes were which kid had to clear the table. But the physics was the same, and the mechanism, the feel of watching your carefully-timed intervention set off a cascade you could not stop, is exactly the feel of standing at the edge of a bigger version of the same problem. There is no version of adult work that a real engineer would not recognize from this game.

Kerplunk was structural failure with a rainbow of sticks and a bag of marbles. We were doing physics. We just called it kerplunk.

I don't want to overstate this. Kerplunk was also just a game where you pulled sticks out of a yellow tube. Some of my most vivid memories of it involve my brother trying to pull a stick out with his teeth because his hands were sticky, and my mother, from the kitchen, saying do not put a stick in your mouth, without looking, because she knew.

The End

Every Kerplunk set died the same way, and it took about eighteen months.

First one stick went missing. This was fine - you had thirty-two of them, you could spare one. Then a second, then a third. The set started drifting under thirty. Somebody sat on the tube and it cracked at the seam, and you taped it, and it worked for a while, but the crack widened. The marbles started rolling out through the crack instead of down through the base.

Then, one Christmas, the box came out of the closet and there were only nineteen sticks and twenty-four marbles and the tube didn't quite stand up straight anymore, and somebody said maybe next year Santa should bring a new one, and the next year Santa did, and the old one went to Goodwill or the attic or the driveway trash. And nobody said anything about it, because it was a game, and now there was a new one, and the new one was shinier and had all its parts. And the new one lasted eighteen months. And so on.

The Kerplunk set had a lifespan. So did the version of you that played it. Both of you got quietly replaced.

I couldn't tell you the last time I played Kerplunk. I could tell you the sound - tick, tick, ker-plunk - as fast as if I'd heard it this morning. That's an unfair test, though. Any sound your childhood used against you is going to be sharper than the game it came from. If the marketing team at Ideal Toys ever wondered whether they picked the right name in 1967, they should not have wondered long. They wrote a jingle out of the sound of a small structural collapse and put it on a box, and thirty-five million kids remembered it for the rest of their lives without being asked to.

I don't want to argue that Kerplunk was more than it was. It was a molded plastic tube and a bag of glass and a stack of colored sticks. It cost eleven dollars in 1994 and it fell apart in a couple of years. But it did teach me something that I have not, since, been able to unlearn - which is that some systems are held up by supports you cannot see, and you can pull the exact right thing at the exact right moment and everything can still come down, and you can pull the wrong thing at the worst moment and nothing can happen at all, and either way, when it stops, the room will be quiet, and you will pass the tube to the next kid. Which is a lesson. Or at least a sound. And the sound, if you know it, you know it.