Post your HAPPY stories here!

[o2william]

Lately I've been seeing too much negativity surrounding the collecting hobby and video games in general. I'm getting pretty tired of logging onto message boards and reading flame wars, allegations and half-informed jackass opinions (I'm not really talking about THIS board, but about some other forums I read). I want to hear something positive for a change.

So, please post your happy video game stories here! They can be tales of wondrous finds, pleasant gaming memories, victorious stories about how you finally mastered that impossible game, or whatever. I'll try to get the ball rolling with the first reply of this thread.

[o2william]

This is one of my favorite stories. Sometime when I was a kid back in the early '80s, my parents and I were eating at a small diner that had a Pac-Man machine. While we were waiting for our food, I asked my Mom for some quarters. She gave me three, I think.

I went up the Pac-Man machine, inserted a quarter and... nothing happened. So I went to hit the coin return (see my avatar for a visual aid), but before I did I noticed three nickels just sitting in the return slot, which I promptly put in my pocket. Not bad, I thought; even if I did lose my quarter at least I got 15 cents of it back.

I didn't really expect the coin return to work (it seemed like they usually didn't), but when I hit it, not one but TWO quarters came tumbling out! AND the machine registered one credit! Now I had four quarters and one credit, which meant five games of Pac-Man! (In those days I was so bad at the game I could blow through 5 credits in a few minutes, but it was still fun!)

So I put those credits to good use, and eventually our food arrived. After we had eaten, as my parents were paying the bill, I decided to look in the coin return slot of the huge jukebox next to the Pac-Man machine. Imagine my surprise when I saw a quarter just lying in there! Now, I thought, surely if I press the coin return another quarter won't be coming out. But I pressed it anyway, and sure enough... another quarter! This was big money to a 7-year-old kid! There wasn't time for more Pac-Man games, so I left the diner 65 cents richer (two quarters and three nickels).

I told my father about my lucky streak, and he joked that he should buy me a lottery ticket. He stopped at a gas station and bought an instant win scatch-off ticket. I scratched it off and won... $2! (Again, big money by 7-year-old standards.) I believe we blew the $2 on more tickets -- just in case -- but in any event I still had my $0.65 and 5 free Pac-Man games. All in all, a fine day.

[hamburgler]

My happiest video game story was when i finally found my turbo grafx system.I always wanted this system but i never could find it.
I looked for it everywhere but still,i could not find it.And i decided that's it i'm not going to stop until i find that system.And then,on a bright sunny day i went to a local video game store to look for some games that i wanted for different systems that i had.When i was looking at a used pile of games i noticed someting very strange on the bottom and thought to myself,Would this be a turbo grafx system? I was very curious and decided to check the bottom and i was right, i found a turbo grafx system with all hookups and a controller and 1 game.That was the happiest moment that i can still think of all the time.

[Achika]

I had a happy trade last night. My bf drove me about an hour and a half through a snow storm last night to his friends house so I could complete a trade last night. Normally, this drive should only take about a half an hour.

The trade? I gave his friend DOA 2: Hardcore for PS 2 for a complete boxed Dreamcast Broadband adapter.

But besides this, I met his gf and we sat and played games all night. A final gaming-goodbye before we leave the country and state. :D

[stonecutter]

I have had lots of great video game memories. There are many more to come also as my five yr old son loves to play video games with me. Also my daughter who is 18 months is taking a liking to the hobby as well. She cannot say basement, however she goes to the door and says " ment ment .....party " She says party because my son and I play lots of Mario Party 4 or Shrek Party. She sits on her chair with a controller in her hands pretending to play as we play. Those are the best memories without a doubt.

[Phosphor Dot Fossils]

When I was living in Green Bay in the late 90s, I had to undergo a long and quite literally torturous series of dental procedures and surgeries to remove and replace essentially half of the teeth in my mouth. Now, I was 26 years old when this started, and I was a big boy, but the magnitude of work involved scared the living hell out of me. So I would go into the waiting room and look around and try to think of anything but what was about to have to be done to me.

And on my second or third visit, I noticed that there was a nicely refurbished Pac-Man cocktail in the kids' area. And I never saw anyone playing it, ever, not in all the time I was ever there. On my third visit, during which I'd had to be desensitized/tranquilized to the point where I couldn't drive home immediately, I mumbled something to the staff about letting me play that machine. This turned out to be not only a good distraction/wake-up period, but a good gauge of the hand-eye coordination necessary before they could let me go back to my car and drive home. So I'd start bringing two or three bucks' worth of quarters with me during every visit, and boy, did I get some weird looks from the kids, wondering who the hell this grown-up was in their area. What they probably couldn't grasp was that, by the time I'd been subjected to enough pain and the anticipation and fear of that pain, I was probably better suited for the kids' area than I was for hanging around with the adults. But having that game there definitely helped, even if I never got it to dish out free change. :P

By the time I finally paid off my bill for all this dental reconstruction work, by all rights I should've owned that machine. I still occasionally think about calling the dentist up and making an offer on it.

Oh, wait, this was a happy story thread, wasn't it? Oh well. It's close enough for me.

[Kid Fenris]

While I was working at EB this holiday season, a woman asked if we had Earth Bound for the SNES. We don't carry older games, but I remembered that I had picked up the cart for five bucks earlier in the year. I arranged to sell it to her for ten dollars, and she told me that I "made Christmas" for her brother and his wife, who had been seeking the game for years.

I suppose I could have charged her twice as much, but it wouldn't have made me feel so much like Santa Claus.