Welcome to another staff article! This time we are sharing fond gaming Christmas memories! From playing games, to impactful gifts we were incredibly thankful for. With Christmas break and time off from work it is the perfect time to give and play games! After reading ours go ahead and share your own gaming Christmas memories!
Aaron Giddings
Remember the viral video of the kids getting a Nintendo 64 for Christmas in 1998? That’s a pretty good stand-in for my own reaction at a Christmas a few years prior to that. You see, every Christmas, at the top of my list, was a Gameboy. Every birthday, Gameboy. And every Christmas and birthday, I got some cool stuff, but never a Gameboy. I was pretty well convinced that my parents were never going to allow me to have one. Then suddenly, one Christmas, there it was in my hands. Again, cue the Nintendo 64 kids for my approximate reaction. I don’t know how many AA batteries I fed into that gray brick over the years, but it was a lot. An AC adapter was the best investment my young teenage self ever made. I could speedrun Super Mario Land in just a few hours. PC games pushed me to be a game developer, but the GameBoy made me a Nintendo fan for life.
Matt Kowalski
My favorite Christmas memory was when I was I received the Pikachu Gameboy for Christmas. At the time, I was one of the only children at school who didn’t have a game boy and was out of the loop from the pokemon trend. So while I was down in Florida, I was surprised by the Pikachu Gameboy color.
At the time, I was not expecting a Gameboy since my mother was struggling to make ends meet and as a single mother paying for rent and bills was her first priority. To this day, I am unsure if my mother bought me the Gameboy or of my grandparents bought the device for me, but as a child receiving something you didn’t expect and only dreamed of the made me ecstatic and overjoyed.
Ryan Richie
There was a period from the late 80s through the late 90s where Christmas time meant Nintendo time for me.. Starting in the Christmas of 1989 with the original NES (I know, we were the last family in the world to get one,) and up until 1996 when I received the N64, it was either a new system or a game I really really wanted that dominated over any other presents, even new socks and underwear.
I can’t recall any presents I’ve received in the last 10 or maybe even 20 years, but without thinking hard I can rattle off the Nintendo related gifts from that time period. In 1990 I received a Gameboy, which allowed me to take my game playing outside, although the only game I had for it was Tetris. The year after that I acquired A SNES and it changed my world. The next few years, for X-Mas, all I wanted was a new SNES game, peaking at, Mortal Kombat II, back in 1994, somehow having convinced my mother to buy then 14-old-me the most controversial game at that time.
It’s been many years, but those will always be the Christmases I remember.
Joe Siemsen
Christmas 1999 I was in the 4th grade, on Christmas Eve my family did a small gift exchange where everyone opens one. I open mine and to my great surprise, it’s a brand new Game Boy color. My first video game console and exactly what I had asked for. I knew we didn’t have a lot of money so I knew what it must have taken for my parents to get the money together to get it for me. I didn’t even have a game for it yet. I just stared at it grinning, cuz I knew this was the hard part. I could save my little money here and there and get a game eventually. I distinctly remember turning it on over and over again just to hear and watch that iconic GameBoy startup.
The next day we got in the car and traveled to see family for a few days. Again I had my new Game Boy and would occasionally flip it on, just to make sure it was all real. My cousin already had a Gameboy and a couple of games for it. So I spent part of the day playing Quest for Camelot and just being stoked that it was on my very own Game Boy. That afternoon during the big gift opening I am surprised again with a second gift from my parents. It was Pokemon Silver. By then I was already pretty obsessed with Poke’Mon, collecting the cards and watching the anime. I hadn’t really played the games much yet, but the entire reason I asked for the Game Boy in the first place was to play Poke’Mon.
It’s safe to say that people didn’t see much of me for a few days after that as I played my first of many playthroughs of Poke’Mon Silver.
