I’m the same in that I was in elementary school when the NES was “the thing to have”… but I don’t think we could afford it at the time.

When I asked my parents for an NES for my seventh birthday in 1989, I got a 2600 and 40-ish games instead. Years later my mom told me she bought the whole thing at a yard sale for about $40.

It wasn’t the latest and greatest… but I didn’t care. I loved it. I had a great time exploring the cartridges, most of them had manuals to go with them, and playing with my dad.

An uncle would later give us an old 386 PC and I played DOS games on it.

I did get a SNES around 1992, so I did have my fair share of Nintendo as a kid. But I certainly didn’t start there and knew that there was more to video games than Nintendo.

I was still playing my 2600 and SNES when I graduated from high school, along with playing CRPGs on the family computer too.