Recently, Peter Skerritt wrote an article about his return to Video Game Castle and those pictures showing endless shelves of classic video games were fantastic.  A couple of days later, Casey Sheld wrote a great article on the topic: ”The one holiday game you have received that really means something to you.”  I was amazed at his selection of Tetris on the Gameboy.  What a revelation.  I was expecting something about Super Smash Brothers Melee or maybe a write-up from the Call of Duty franchise.  Last, but not least, Paul Bentley has put together a great two-part article chronicling all the different gaming systems he’s owned over the years.  For me, all of these articles really tapped into the nostalgia of video games.  Something that’s easy to forget about when we’re busy harvesting crops in Farmville and playing every version of Angry Birds on our brand new phones and tablets.

So what was it for me?  What was the catalyst that made me a gamer for life?  I was a child of the late 80′s early 90′s.  My uncles had a ColecoVision in the closet (It was never hooked up for me to play) and I had heard them talk about Pong and Atari, but I had yet to enjoy my first video game.  That all changed Christmas 1988, when I opened my Donkey Kong II Nintendo Game & Watch.  To say I was excited is a bit of an understatement.  Waiting for my dad to get those two watch batteries snuggly in their home felt like an eternity.  Once I had that system in my hands it was love at first byte.  I had my very own video game and even better, I could take it wherever I wanted.  Heck, I even had a Nintendo before many of my friends and I could take it to school and rub it in.  That was some serious grade school Street Cred.

I loved that game, and a year later my parents bought us the NES Action Set.  Even with the NES in the house, I still kept it by my bed and would play long into the night when I was suppose to be sleeping.  I wasn’t able to hoard everything from my youth.  Much of it was sold at garage sales by my mom, but the Game & Watch still sits on my desk.