Nike: Delivering on the childhood dreams you may have forgotten you had.

There is a huge, long running and increasingly popular meme that the future in which we are living is not futuristic enough. To wit: “Where the fuck is my jetpack already?” Now at least one company has stepped forward and attempted to make our present look more like how people thought our present would look when it was their future twenty years ago.

That is Nike have finally brought out a shoe that is kinda like the one in Back to the Future 2.

The Nike Hyperdunk (only nicknamed the McFly, for fear of stepping on toes, legally speaking) is pretty clearly inspired by the sneakers that Nike created for Back to the Future 2, and it looks pretty awesome really. It’s not the exact shoe: in terms of the design, and especially in terms of the fact that it doesn’t light up (it does glow in the dark though) and the laces don’t tie themselves. I’m gonna put my neck out however, and say it probably looks better than the one in the movie, and it is after all a basketball shoe, made for sports, and the original looks kinda like a ski-boot. Some people are never satisfied though, and you can still sign the online petition to get Nike to release the real things here. I like that these guys are purists, and they ain't gonna settle for anything less than the complete and perfect realisation of their dream.

I first saw about the sneakers a while back on a… sneaker site somewhere, but CNBC actually has a remarkably comprehensive article here. Interestingly Nike’s sneaker braintrust Tinker Hatfield did patent the movie shoes back when the movie came out.

Oh, and in other news Nike’s sneaker braintrust, and the man who invented cross-training shoes is called Tinker Hatfield.

All this and still no hoverboard? Can’t you do anything right, Science?