The company was established as "Mantua Metal Products" in Woodbury Heights, New Jersey, as a metalworks business founded in 1926 by John Tyler and family.

In the 1930s Mantua began to manufacture HO scale model trains of die-cast metal and became a leading hobbyist brand.

Eventually, the name changed to "TYCO Industries", under which name the company was sold in 1970 to Consolidated Foods during an era of corporate conglomerates.

[9] Across the late 1980s and early 1990s, some of Tyco's most popular toys came from their Radio Control division, with over 100 different models manufactured primarily through their partnership with Taiyo RC (Japan).

These products and their manufacturing deal with Taiyo became so important that they took a significant ownership stake in the company, and began to strongly influence the features and design of the vehicles.

Tyco's Sesame Street line increased dramatically in popularity in 1996, when the plush doll Tickle Me Elmo became the most sought-after toy of the Christmas season.

On February 23, 2019, Terry Flynn announced that Tyco was now a registered trademark of his Harden Creek Slot Cars, LLC."

[citation needed] The Tyco model railroad business was bought back by the Tyler family in 1977, who revived them under the Mantua Industries brand.

[citation needed] One product of Tyco, the Mutator R/C car, plays a central role to the plot of the 1997 holiday-family comedy movie, Home Alone 3, where it is used as a concealing device by a quartet of terrorist agents to hide an extremely classified microchip that they intend to smuggle to North Korea and later ends up in the hands of the protagonist, a chickenpox-stricken boy, after a luggage mix up at airport security.