What was your first game console?

When asking that question of anyone who was raised in the '90s, you’re likely to get a variety of answers. A Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) or the Super Nintendo (SNES) is perhaps the most common of the answers you would receive.

Sure, there were others, but at that point in time, Nintendo and Sega were the two leading contenders, with a few other stragglers coming in close behind them. The market for home entertainment consoles was still recovering after the failures of Western game developers such as Atari nearly bankrupted and devastated the industry. In fact, the viability of the console gaming market was so badly tarnished that Nintendo apparently had to market the NES to its consumers as a toy rather than a gaming console so as to avoid the negative stigma the title carried with the majority of the consumer market. Who would have ever thought that this tiny bit of misdirection is what would inspire a dramatic shift in the entertainment market and would eventually end up changing the world of popular culture forever.

My first game system was a Sega Genesis, which was handed down to me from one of my cousins for Christmas when I was about 5 years old. The simplicity of it all baffles me to this day. “Insert Cartridge Here” followed by a flip of a switch and up popped the title screen. There was almost something magical about it. Sure the graphics and gameplay was a little primitive and a lot of the titles for most home game consoles haven’t aged very well, but it was instant and affordable entertainment that didn’t require me loitering around a smoke-filled arcade, or dragging my feet as my mother tried to pull me away from the game cabinet at the local pizza parlor before the pies in the boxes she was holding went cold.

I wasn’t destitute by any stretch of the imagination while growing up, but when it came to most things that I received as the occasional gift, or for that matter, saved enough to buy, I treasured them. I kept and maintained almost every gift I was ever given growing up, and most of it I still have somewhere, tucked away in some box in a pile of boxes under another pile of boxes in a long forgotten closet somewhere. It’s almost like a treasure hunt of sorts. I would go digging one afternoon for something and wind up uncovering the exact opposite of what I was looking for and end up wasting most of the afternoon playing with some action figure or looking through an old photo album. There is one box however, that I wish I would have rediscovered a little sooner.

There was a problem with a water line at my grandfather’s home and because of this, the whole back end of his house flooded. The water went everywhere, including into some of the hallway and spare bedroom closets. There, sitting at the bottom of a pile of boxes and long forgotten by time, sat the large cardboard box that contained all of my old game consoles as well as all of the games I had kept for them. The loss was complete and devastating, and I will readily admit to shedding more than a few tears over the matter. Even more so now that the market for such things has spiked, making most of the titles I owned worth a considerable amount of money. However, even at the time, it wasn’t so much the loss of material property that concerned me as much as the loss of the memories that had went along with it. I mean these days, emulating old hardware to play some of the games that made their respective systems famous is easy and affordable, but it’s just not the same. There’s no soul to it, no physical connection to a tangible thing. It’s just data.

This past week, I engaged in a rather colorful debate with a friend about the current state of console gaming. Bear in mind that this friend has made it his life’s work to seek out, purchase and restore old arcade cabinets, which he then either collects, sells or donates to certain establishments when he’s done. His recreation room/basement of his house runs on a power grid completely separate from the rest of his home, and the last time I counted, he must have had at least 35 to 40 working cabinets, not counting the ones he was currently restoring for clients in his garage in his free time. However, that day I was spectating the dissection of something a little more modern than what was typically found on his work bench.

I was helping him crack open his PlayStation 4 so he could do a hardware install and upgrade. He was taking out the standard hard drive that came factory stock in the machine and was installing a terabyte-sized solid state drive so that he could not only store more data on the machine, but so it could run the majority of games being made for the system faster as well.

“Call me crazy, but I remember a time when the entire reason you bought a game console was to have a machine that was specifically built for the purpose of playing games right out of the box, that was on demand whenever you wanted to use it.”

I nodded silently in agreement as he fussed and fumbled with the screws, grumbling something about how games used to be convenient and fun. Looking back on it, I can’t help but agree with him. Nowadays, your console has become the neediest thing you will ever have the misfortune of owning. You go away for a weekend and come back to play a quick game after work and you’re greeted with no less than five software updates and a system update before you can even get to your dashboard menu screen. Then you pop in a disk or start an application, and there are anywhere from three to five updates to the game itself. By the time everything is said and done, 40 minutes of your life has been wasted and by that point, any desire you may have previously held to actually play a game has been curbed, right along with your enthusiasm.

While PC gaming has and always will be a viable option, the entire point of making a game console in the first place was to take very specific technology for a very specific task, make it as simple to use and affordable as possible, and shove it in a box with a price tag on it. Not everyone can afford personal computers that are built for gaming, just like not everyone has the experience or know-how to deal with what is essentially entry-level computer programming just to get a game to work in the first place. Consoles originally offered consumers an escape from that, but as the efforts of my friend demonstrated, apparently there’s nothing convenient about consoles anymore, either. When you have to upgrade the hardware of something you initially paid hundreds of dollars for in the first place to make it run properly the things that were supposed to specifically be made for it in the first place, I think there’s something seriously wrong.

It seems I’m not the only one who agrees. Thrift shops and used book stores all over the country have started buying and trading in old games and accessories for the systems that played them and they’re doing quite well.

There are scores of indie games and even games from major publishers that are starting to mimic and recreate visuals and hardware specifications that recreate the look and feel of 8-bit era games, attempting to cash in on the current trend of Millennial generation nostalgia. Although this has led to a relative inflation in the cost of some of these games, given their condition and rarity, I can’t help but feel some excitement over this trend simply because now I am given an opportunity to revisit some of the memories I lost.

Better yet, I can relive those memories from a different and more complex perspective now that I have grown into an adult and have been given a great deal more perspective on those experiences. I guess it’s time to start browsing flea markets and yard sales again and maybe, one day rebuild my old collection.