A child in 2003 kept a white-corded pair of earbuds coiled in a pocket, snapped a phone shut with one hand to end a call, and spent an entire car ride spinning a purple top against a cousin's blue one. None of it felt unusual. It felt like the 2000s. This is the fifth and final panel in this series: the dates behind it, and an honest look at what, if anything, a twenty-year-old gadget sells for today.
The short version
- This is the fifth and final entry in this series: a 5x5 panel of twenty-five objects, a date for each one, and a market note. The 2000s closes it out.
- Several of the twenty-five carry hard dates: Steve Jobs unveiled the iPod on October 23, 2001, calling it "1,000 songs in your pocket," and it went on sale November 10, 2001 at $399; the PlayStation 2 launched in Japan March 4, 2000 and in the US that October 26 at $299; Facebook opened at Harvard on February 4, 2004, four years before it opened to anyone with an email address.
- The decade's clearest boom-and-bust belongs to a piece of software, not a toy. Napster had 26.4 million users at its February 2001 peak and was shut down by a federal injunction that July, five months later and barely two years after it launched.
- At least four things on this panel are routinely misdated. SpongeBob SquarePants is a 1999 show; Yu-Gi-Oh! and Beyblade both started in Japan the same year, two or three years before reaching American shelves; and Silly Bandz, which went on sale at the very end of 2008, belong by sales volume to the decade that followed them.
- This is the youngest decade in the series, and the market shows it: nothing on this panel turned up a realized auction price for this guide. What follows is mostly launch prices, company-reported sales totals, and one stock chart — not resale results.
On this page
The panel: score yourself
Twenty-five squares, five rows of five, the same format as the first four entries in this series, and the panel keeps score. Tap each square you can picture without effort and pass over the ones you can merely name. Anyone who clears twenty was a child sometime in this decade. Anyone who clears twelve grew up around a television, or a browser, that ran ads for at least half of this panel.
25 things only 2000s kids remember
Tap a square for each one you can picture without effort
In the house
In front of the television
In the toy box
Out on the street
At school and at the counter
0 of 25
Tap each square you can picture without effort. The count keeps itself.
- Tap each square you can picture without effort. The count keeps itself.
- Hand-me-down territory: an older sibling's console, a rerun, a cousin's hand-me-down phone.
- You grew up around a television, or a browser, that ran ads for at least half of this panel.
- You were a child sometime in this decade.
- A clean sweep. You were there for all of it, down to the buffering wheel.
In the house: 1 to 5
1. The iPod, and the five gigabytes Steve Jobs called "1,000 songs in your pocket." Apple unveiled the device October 23, 2001, and put it on sale November 10, 2001 at $399, built around a 5 GB hard drive Jobs sized, in his own phrase at the announcement, to hold a thousand songs. A 10 GB second model followed March 20, 2002, less than five months later.
2. The Motorola RAZR, and the phone that outlasted its own price cuts. Motorola released the RAZR V3 in the US on November 16, 2004, pitched first as a premium phone before price cuts drove volume. Reported lifetime sales run from 110 million (official figures through 2011) to 130 million (later tallies); either way it was the most popular phone in the US for three straight years, 2005 through 2007, holding the lead until Apple's iPhone 3G overtook it in 2008, and it is still described as the best-selling flip phone ever built.
3. The PlayStation 2, and the record that still stands. Sony launched the PS2 in Japan March 4, 2000 at ¥39,800, then in the US October 26, 2000 at $299. It went on to sell roughly 160 million units worldwide, the best-selling video game console of all time — a title no later console, from any company, has taken back.
4. The Nintendo Wii, and the remote that put the controller back in the room. Nintendo launched the Wii in North America November 19, 2006 at $249.99. Its remote reads motion with a built-in accelerometer and points at the screen using an infrared sensor bar, technology Nintendo began developing with motion-patent holder Gyration Inc. as early as September 2001 — five years before the console that used it reached a store shelf.
5. Napster, and the lawsuit that outran the music it was trading. Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker launched the free song-swapping service June 1, 1999. Usage peaked at 26.4 million verified users in February 2001, two weeks before a federal injunction, issued March 5, 2001 under A&M Records, Inc. v. Napster, Inc., ordered it to block trading in copyrighted songs. Napster shut its entire network down July 11, 2001 to comply, not quite twenty-five months after it opened.
Hunting any of these? Prowl searches more than twenty vintage marketplaces at once, so you can see the whole range of what is listed before you commit to a price.
In front of the television: 6 to 10
6. SpongeBob SquarePants, a 1999 show this decade adopted as its own. Nickelodeon aired a sneak preview after the 1999 Kids' Choice Awards on May 1, 1999, with the official series premiere following July 17, 1999. Creator Stephen Hillenburg, a former marine-science educator, had pitched the series to the network two years earlier. Weekly viewership reached roughly 15 million by the end of 2001, and the franchise has produced more than $16 billion in merchandise revenue since.
7. American Idol, and the eight-season winning streak that started it. Fox premiered the singing competition June 11, 2002. It became the most-watched show on American television by 2004 and held that position for seven consecutive seasons; its season 2 finale in 2003 drew more than 38 million viewers, the show's largest single-episode audience.
8. YouTube, and the eighteen-second zoo video that started it. Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim founded the company February 14, 2005. Its first uploaded video, "Me at the zoo," went up April 23, 2005 — the same day the site opened to the public.
9. Guitar Hero, built on a plastic guitar and a $1 million budget. Harmonix released the original game November 8, 2005 for PlayStation 2, published by RedOctane on a reported development budget of about $1 million. It sold roughly 1.5 million copies and earned more than $45 million, launching a franchise that has since sold over 25 million units worldwide for close to $2 billion at retail.
10. High School Musical, the TV movie that outsold the albums around it. Disney Channel premiered the film January 20, 2006 to 7.7 million viewers, a network premiere record at the time. Its soundtrack, released ten days earlier, reached No. 1 on the Billboard 200 twice that March, had shipped 3.8 million copies by December 2006, and was named the year's best-selling album by Billboard.
In the toy box: 11 to 15
11. Bratz dolls, designed by a Mattel employee for Mattel's biggest rival. Carter Bryant, then working at Mattel, designed the dolls for MGA Entertainment, which released the original four on May 21, 2001. Mattel sued MGA for $500 million in 2006 over the designs; a 2008 federal jury sided largely with Mattel, but the Ninth Circuit reversed course in 2010 and ruled the franchise belonged to MGA after all — a fight that produced more courtroom reversals than any other object on this panel.
12. Webkinz, a stuffed animal with a password. Ganz, a Canadian toy and home-décor company, launched Webkinz April 15, 2005: a plush animal with a code sewn into its tag that unlocked a matching virtual pet online, one a child fed, dressed and housed on a screen while the real version sat on a shelf.
13. Bionicle, the Lego line that outearned the bricks. Lego test-marketed the construction-and-story toy line in Europe and Australia in December 2000 before a mid-2001 launch in North America. It brought in £100 million in its first year and was ranked Lego's top-selling theme in both 2003 and 2006.
14. Beyblade, a spinning-top fight that started two years before most American kids saw it. Takara released the first Beyblades in Japan in 1999. Hasbro did not bring them to the US until 2002, after which more than five million tops sold stateside within a year.
15. Heelys, patented a year before the decade that wore them out. Psychologist and inventor Roger Adams patented the wheeled-heel shoe design in 1999. The design reached American sidewalks and school hallways soon after, common enough that several school districts banned wearing them indoors.
Owl and Twig Vintage searches for exactly this kind of thing every week. Prowl does the same searching for you, across more than twenty vintage marketplaces at once.
Out on the street: 16 to 20
16. The Razor scooter, a six-month sellout. Micro Mobility Systems designed the folding aluminum kick scooter, and JD Corporation began manufacturing it for the US market in 2000. More than five million sold in its first six months on shelves, a pace nothing else on this panel matched.
17. The Juicy Couture tracksuit, custom-made for Madonna before it was mass-made for everyone. Pamela Skaist-Levy and Gela Nash-Taylor, who renamed their Travis Jeans label Juicy Couture in 1996, introduced the velour tracksuit in 2001 as a custom piece made for Madonna. By 2004 it was back in heavy rotation on Jennifer Lopez, Britney Spears and Paris Hilton, and an industry estimate later put Juicy's sales near $200 million in a single year.
18. Crocs, which sold out its first 200 pairs at a Florida boat show. Scott Seamans, Lyndon Hanson and George Boedecker Jr. founded the company in 2002 and introduced its first model, the Beach, at that year's Fort Lauderdale Boat Show; all 200 pairs sold. Crocs went public on the Nasdaq February 8, 2006 at $21.00 a share, then watched that stock fall as low as $0.79 during the 2008 financial crisis before recovering.
19. The yellow Livestrong wristband, a dollar that raised half a billion. Nike designed the silicone bracelet with its agency Wieden+Kennedy for the Lance Armstrong Foundation, launching it in May 2004. Roughly 80 million had sold by 2013, and the foundation reported more than $500 million raised over its history.
20. Silly Bandz, which launched at the end of this decade and peaked in the next one. BCP Imports owner Robert Croak adapted a shaped-rubber-band design originated by a Japanese design team in 2002, and began selling the bands online in November 2008. The nationwide craze that followed — thousands of stores carrying them, seven spots on Amazon's best-seller list by April 2010, control of Amazon's top 25 toys by that December — belongs almost entirely to 2010 and 2011, not to the decade that produced them.
At school and at the counter: 21 to 25
21. The iTunes Store, which sold 275,000 songs in its first eighteen hours. Apple opened the store for Mac OS X on April 28, 2003, with a Windows version following that October. Most songs sold for 99 cents, and the store had sold 70 million tracks by its first anniversary, April 28, 2004.
22. MySpace, briefly the most-visited website in the country. Chris DeWolfe, Tom Anderson and Jon Hart launched the site August 1, 2003. By June 2006 it had passed Google and Yahoo Mail to become the most-visited website in the United States, and by April 2008 it counted 115 million monthly visitors.
23. Facebook, four years a college network before it was anything else. Mark Zuckerberg launched "TheFacebook" at Harvard on February 4, 2004, with Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz, Andrew McCollum and Chris Hughes. Registration stayed limited to students at specific colleges until 2006, when the site opened to anyone 13 or older with a valid email address.
24. Yu-Gi-Oh! cards, a Japanese game three years old before most American kids met it. Konami's trading card game launched in Japan February 4, 1999; Upper Deck did not bring it to North America until March 2002. Guinness World Records named it the best-selling trading card game in the world on July 7, 2009, crediting it with more than 22 billion cards sold to that point.
25. The Nintendo DS, which sold 154 million units on two screens and a stylus. Nintendo launched the handheld in North America November 21, 2004 at $149.99. Combined sales of every DS model reached about 154.02 million units by March 31, 2016.
Sourcing 2000s toys, electronics, or fashion worth checking before you list it? Prowl searches more than twenty vintage marketplaces at once.
What this material sells for
The 2000s is, by the usual rule of thumb, several years too young to have produced a settled collectibles market. No realized auction price turned up for any of this panel's twenty-five objects while researching this guide. The figures below are launch prices, company-reported sales totals and one stock chart — not resale results for a used object today.
| Item | Figure | Verified or reported |
|---|---|---|
| iPod, 1st generation, new, November 2001 | 399 dollars | Published launch price |
| PlayStation 2, new, US, October 2000 | 299 dollars | Published launch price |
| Nintendo DS, new, US, November 2004 | 149.99 dollars | Published launch price |
| Nintendo Wii, new, US, November 2006 | 249.99 dollars | Published launch price |
| Motorola RAZR, lifetime units sold | 110 to 130 million | Reported; official counts rose between 2008 and later retrospectives |
| Guitar Hero franchise, cumulative retail sales | about 2 billion dollars | Reported, across the whole series, not the 2005 original alone |
| Crocs Inc. stock, Nasdaq IPO (Feb. 2006) vs. 2008 low | 21.00 dollars a share to 0.79 dollars a share | Verified trading record |
| Livestrong Foundation, total funds raised over its history | over 500 million dollars | Reported by the foundation |
We would normally close this table with a resale or auction figure, the way the first four panels in this series did. For this decade, that line does not exist yet — which may be the clearest sign of how recent all of it still is.
Where the nostalgia gets the date wrong
Four things connected to this panel are routinely mis-dated, and three of them trace back to the same single year.
- SpongeBob SquarePants is a 1999 show. Its sneak preview aired after the 1999 Kids' Choice Awards, four months before the first Y2K headline. Nearly all of its cultural reach, and all $16 billion of its merchandise revenue, belongs to the decade that followed its premiere, not the one it was born in.
- Yu-Gi-Oh! and Beyblade are both 1999 Japanese releases. Neither reached an American shelf until 2002, and that three-year gap is the only reason either one reads as a 2000s object to a US collector at all.
- Heelys were patented the same year. Roger Adams filed the patent in 1999 — a third unrelated product, from a third unrelated industry, that needed a few more years on the shelf before it became what this decade remembers it as.
- Silly Bandz run the usual trope backward. The bands went on sale in November 2008, inside this decade by a matter of weeks, but the fad that made them famous — the store counts, the Amazon rankings — belongs to 2010 and 2011. Most objects on a panel like this one are older than the decade that claims them. This is the rare case of one born right at the edge of a decade and claimed by the next.
The rest of the decades
This is the fifth and final panel in the series, following the 1950s entry, the 1960s entry, the 1970s entry, the 1980s entry, and the 1990s entry.
The pattern that held across the first four panels holds here too, stated more plainly than ever: the object a child remembers best is rarely new to the decade it is remembered in, and the market built around the loudest fad is rarely the one that survives it. Napster lasted twenty-five months. Silly Bandz proved the same point from the opposite direction. The quieter entries on this panel — a patent filing, a launch date, a stock chart — are the parts of the record still standing twenty-some years later.
More from the Field Guides: our McDonald's Changeables guide covers a licensed toy fad from the decade just before this one, and our Nauga doll guide covers the same kind of mascot-built brand identity behind Juicy Couture and Crocs above. Everything we have written sits in the Field Guides index.
Owl and Twig Vintage is a Michigan estate and vintage shop. Prowl is the free sourcing tool we built for our own hunting and opened up to everyone.
Sources
- IPod, Wikipedia — the October 23 and November 10, 2001 dates, the $399 price, the 5 GB and 10 GB models.
- Motorola Razr V3, Wikipedia — the November 16, 2004 US release, sales figures, and the 2005–2008 popularity run.
- PlayStation 2, Wikipedia — the Japan and US launch dates and prices, and the 160-million lifetime sales figure.
- Wii, Wikipedia — the November 19, 2006 launch, the $249.99 price, and the Wii Remote's motion-sensing development history.
- Napster, Wikipedia — the June 1, 1999 launch, peak user figures, the A&M Records v. Napster injunction, and the July 11, 2001 shutdown.
- SpongeBob SquarePants, Wikipedia — the May 1 and July 17, 1999 premiere dates, creator background, and viewership and revenue figures.
- American Idol, Wikipedia — the June 11, 2002 premiere and viewership records.
- YouTube, Wikipedia — the February 14, 2005 founding and the April 23, 2005 first upload and public launch.
- Guitar Hero, Wikipedia — the November 8, 2005 release, development budget, and franchise sales.
- High School Musical, Wikipedia — the January 20, 2006 premiere, viewership, and soundtrack chart and sales figures.
- Bratz, Wikipedia — the May 21, 2001 release and the Mattel v. MGA litigation timeline.
- Webkinz, Wikipedia — the April 15, 2005 launch and the toy-plus-online-world concept.
- Bionicle, Wikipedia — the December 2000 test market, 2001 North American launch, and first-year sales.
- Beyblade, Wikipedia — the 1999 Japan release and US sales figures.
- Heelys, Wikipedia — the 1999 patent and inventor background.
- Razor (scooter), Wikipedia — the 2000 US launch and six-month sales figure.
- Juicy Couture, Wikipedia — the 1996 renaming, the 2001 Madonna tracksuit, and the 2004 celebrity revival.
- Crocs, Wikipedia — the 2002 founding and Boat Show debut, and the 2006 IPO and 2008 stock low.
- Livestrong wristband, Wikipedia — the May 2004 launch and sales and fundraising figures.
- Silly Bandz, Wikipedia — the November 2008 online launch and the 2010 nationwide fad timeline.
- ITunes Store, Wikipedia — the April 28, 2003 launch and early sales figures.
- Myspace, Wikipedia — the August 1, 2003 launch and 2006–2008 traffic figures.
- Facebook, Wikipedia — the February 4, 2004 launch, founders, and the 2006 public opening.
- Yu-Gi-Oh! Trading Card Game, Wikipedia — the 1999 Japan launch, the March 2002 North American release, and the Guinness sales record.
- Nintendo DS, Wikipedia — the November 21, 2004 launch, price, and lifetime unit sales.
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