Gift: Nintendo Entertainment System (1990)

This one is obvious. What kid didn’t dream of waking up on Christmas morning and finding a brand new Nintendo under the tree? Only kids who already had Nintendos, and by 1990 there were a lot of them. I was a little late to the Nintendo party. I knew a lot of people who already had one (or had the similar, lamer alternative, the Sega Master System), and I had played it casually for a long time at different people’s houses. But among my close friends, I was the only one to own a genuine NES and (very soon) a large library of games. In fact, it’s a little surprising when I look back now how quickly my bundle of Nintendo related crap accumulated. I only had it for about 18 months before I moved on to Sega Genesis, but in that short time I accumulated a disproportionate amount of games and fun.

The Nintendo was one of the very last presents I opened that Christmas. Christmas of 1990 was the Christmas of MC Hammer and the Ninja Turtles and The Simpsons, and I was fortunate enough to add a brand new Nintendo to that embarrassment of riches. It came with a note saying I had to share it with my dad, but other than the original Super Mario Brothers my dad has been unable to figure out a single video game, so I’m not sure what the purpose of the note was. Early on, my parents would play Mario in the other room after I went to bed, and I still have good memories of listening to them argue about the best way to get past King Koopa (as we called him in those days). Sometimes my dad would even come home from work excited because he had learned some new secret from a co-worker.
That phase passed quickly, however, and for the most part I had the Nintendo all to myself. Initially I spent all of my time on the three games I got that Christmas: Mario and Duck Hunt, of course, along with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Fester’s Quest. Both of the latter games have more than earned their reputation as some of the worst games on Nintendo, even though the Ninja Turtles were so popular that everyone had that stupid game. Standards of video game quality weren’t quite up to their modern standards yet, and I made do the best I could. I enjoyed Mario, but it never quite clicked for me the way it did with a lot of people; it wasn’t until I got Mario 3 a few months later that I really plunged into a Mario game. I also, to my later humiliation, loved the Zelda cartoon series, so much so that I wanted to make it into my very first live action movie, and so a snow day rental of Zelda 2 (not the original) became one of my earliest Nintendo highlights. I was always, and perhaps foolishly, interested in games with established characters and plots, hence the ownership of the terrible Ninja Turtles game.

Somehow, despite the terrible games, I became a big Nintendo fan, and, even more stunningly, my house became a Mecca for other 3rd graders seeking a chance to enjoy time with the sacred gray box. In those days we had a fourth bedroom upstairs that was almost exclusively reserved for playing Nintendo, and it became our club house. Far removed from the rest of the house, it was a place where the kids could learn and study the craft of Nintendo relatively free from adult interference. Shortly I added some new games to the repertoire—Gremlins 2 (yay!), Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Good One, and of course Super Mario Brothers 3. The Nintendo age had truly begun.
It’s funny—there was nothing more important to me that Christmas than getting a Nintendo, and I have dozens of great, unforgettable memories associated with that thing, but when I think of that Christmas it’s the lesser presents I remember more. Like The Simpsons Sing the Blues, Gremlins 2, my Ninja Turtles Tiger handheld game (remember those?) and my MC Hammer tape. 1990 was more about all the crazy cartoon fads that were exploding in the elementary school pop-culture scene than any big gift. The more I think about it, the more I think that maybe Nintendo might not have become the phenomenon it was were it not so closely linked to all those exploding fads. There were Simpsons games, Ninja Turtles, games for just about every movie and property to come along—most of those games were terrible, but I’m sure they helped sell Nintendos as much as Mario did.

I’ve written more about 1990 than any other Christmas, probably because there were so many popular characters and TV shows swirling around back then. Only in a year as vibrant with pop culture kiddy confection could something as wondrous as a Nintendo be only one among many memorable gifts. What an awesome time to be 8 years old.