Nike Aims To Give Those Back To The Future Shoes A 2015 Release

By Brent McKnight | Published

This article is more than 2 years old

Nike Air MAG2015 is the year that Marty McFly jumps to in Back to the Future 2, so I hope you’re ready for 12 months worth of jokes about how we don’t have hoverboards yet (they still have until October, but it doesn’t seem too likely). But there is one potential invention that we could see before too long, as according to Nike, 2015 will be the year we finally get those sweet kicks, the Nike Air MAGs, you know, the awesome high-tops with the power laces.

There have been some knock offs floating around over the years, but these are going to be the real deal, and apparently the shoe design brain trust at the manufacturer has been devoting a significant amount of time to working on this. One of the biggest problems they’ve encountered is how to power those power laces, especially because they don’t want to have to add a bulky battery pack.

But they’re making progress on this issue, and they may be close. Nike’s innovation chief, the appropriately named Tinker Hatfield (seriously, how perfect is that name for a guy with a job like this?), says that they’re actually close to a solution. Though he won’t give a specific date when we could see these on the open market, on Monday he told the crowd at a trade show in Long Beach, California that they will show up sometime this year, and notes that there are still “11 and two-thirds months left in 2015.”

He also neglected to name a price, even a ballpark figure, but you have to imagine that, one, this will be a very limited run, and two, that there will be a rather substantial monetary investment involved in adding a pair of these to your sneaker collection. But you probably already assumed that would be the case.

This isn’t the first time Nike has worked on the Air MAG problem, and some of you will remember that a few years ago they released a version, though without the all important power laces. Admittedly, they were still pretty cool, and they auctioned off 1500 pairs to benefit the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Disease research, so it was for a good cause.

We’ve got the Nike Air MAGs on the way, and hoverboards are coming along in their fashion, so now what we really need to make this year complete is Jaws 19. There is definitely a ways to go on that front, but that one guy is working on it, so 2015 might just be the year Back to the Future 2 envisioned after all.