SACKING UP: A forgotten Gen X fad bounces back with Zoomers

Some say it's a meme, others say it's relief from perpetual screen use.

Either way, a Generation X craze has gone so viral that retailers are selling out after the game's popularity spiked late last month.

'On a good day, I get 200 to 300 visitors to my website. We're now pushing 4,000.'

Charlie, a 13-year-old from New Jersey. recently told Good Housekeeping that he started playing because one of his friends saw it online and wanted to try it out.

"Then we all started playing," he revealed.

Money bags

The online trend has created a massive resurgence of footbags, often generically called “hacky sacks,” despite the fact that Hacky Sack is actually a trademarked brand owned by Wham-O Toys Inc.

Google Trends shows that searches for queries like "hacky sack" and "footbag" exploded by upwards of 500% at the end of April, which included searches for the popular brand Dirtbag, which makes classic hacky sacks with a stick figure logo.

The company said it is sold out of footbags on its website, its Amazon storefront, and its TikTok shop. The craze took off shortly before this year's spring break, reaching new heights once students returned to school.

Retailer Mike Heher, who runs Bomb Footbags out of Lake Tahoe, California, told the Boston Globe that he had no idea what was going on before speaking to the paper.

"I'm 41, I've been selling hacky sacks since I was a teenager. And on a good day, I get 200 to 300 visitors to my website. We're now pushing 4,000."

Many of the sales can likely be attributed to viral videos on TikTok as well.

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- YouTube

Hack-a-thon

One video with over 320,000 views stated that hacky sack is slowly "taking over" their school, and from there, users can doomscroll countless similar videos from high school students to adults, to even minor league baseball teams.

Another user mentioned getting her father's hacky sack out from the archives to learn how to play, while other videos show groups of girls playing, something typically unheard of in the 1990s/2000s, perhaps showcasing the monster this trend has become.

The movement is growing and seems to have taken hold in Massachusetts high schools where teens have created social media pages for their "sack team."

The Globe noted that using the word "sack" as much as possible is part of the reason boys find it hilarious to take part in the game, using hashtags like #SpreadSackNotHate.

Jason Gallagher, a headmaster at Boston Latin School, told the Globe he has never seen a trend "explode as quickly as this."

Students agree:

"I'd never seen anyone playing it at school, then all of a sudden in the past week people are playing in the bathroom, the parking lot, the teachers are playing it," said Ben, a junior at Gloucester High School. "I now keep a hacky sack in the back seat of my car."

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Faith Cathcart/Portland Press Herald/Getty Images

Teenage kicks

The Mass. teams are even competing to climb the rankings of the Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association official hacky sack rankings, which was jokingly created as an unofficial state ranking system but is getting very serious. It now has at least 96 teams participating in the rankings.

Ryan, an 18-year-old senior from Westwood High, said there were probably double the amount of people playing in Massachusetts alone.

"It's just mayhem, everyone arguing to get their ranking up, which makes it more fun," he told the Globe.

This is yet another example of "retro toys" making a comeback, Jenn Lynch of the Toy Association told Good Housekeeping. She added that part of the reason is that today's parents are the "original hacky sack generation."

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