I will add that I got my first taste of the NES at a combination of store kiosks, neighbors' and friends' houses. It was an interesting dynamic. I don't think ANY of my cousins got one before me, just one at the same time (both of us were born in August - birthday). The younger ones were too small, and the older cousins actually scoffed at it. They still felt that the 2600 or Atari 8-bit/C64 were going to outlive this new "fad," which made little sense. NES blew them out of the water.

The neighbor next door was a couple years older than me, and I think he got the NES for Christmas '87. They had Super Mario Bros. of course, which we were all mesmerized by. He had R.O.B. as well with Gyromite, which we could never fully figure out how to play. Off hand I don't remember us playing much else than SMB for months and months. My best friend got the NES in spring of '88, with SMB, but we'd played that to death. Believe it or not, 2-player Nintendo Baseball was our game of choice that summer! As horrible as that is to play now, we played it to death. We could not believe how much better it was than prior baseball games.

After getting my NES, I let my sister go to town on SMB, but my father and I played RC Pro-Am and Mike Tyson's Punch-Out! the most. He held the controller upside down in his hands, like a keyboard, which was bizarre. Eventually his patience wore thin with Great Tiger and he quit video games for good! When I learned how to block his attacks, he was stunned. My cousin got The Legend of Zelda that summer with her new NES. Just as we had stayed up all night playing Miner 2049er on the 800, we did the same with Zelda. Wow, what a game. That Christmas I got Zelda and Metroid, which I played non-stop.

I would say my favorite memories going forward were playing 2P games like TMNT 2, Baseball Stars, Tecmo Bowl, or Super Off-Road with my friends and family. NES will always be my dearest system. In grade school we traded mostly unfounded game secrets, as well as Nintendo trading cards! We swapped pages from the player's guide. We had a neighborhood game swapping program, too! People rag on Nintendo, but they've always seemed to provide the best gaming memories when you're 8-12 years old, generation after generation.