I'll never forget the first time I saw Super Mario Bros. running on an NES. It was so far beyond anything I'd ever played on my dad's Intellivision or any of my friends' Ataris that I thought video gaming must have finally hit its peak. Oh to be young and naive like that again.
But anyway, I had to have one. A kid I knew had gotten one (complete with ROB) but that wasn't good enough, I needed to be able to play SMB on my time, not his. I didn't even care about ROB or the Zapper, or any of the other half dozen or so early games he had, I just needed SMB.
I saved and saved, and saved some more, always trying to get my parents to pay me for some chore or something, but it was slow going. Then one weekend when a friend was coming over to stay the night we stopped in Toys R Us for some reason. My parents were acting somewhat suspiciously, and sure enough as we were going through the register, turns out they had grabbed one of the tags for an NES Control Deck (w/SMB pack in) and were going to cover what was left that I hadn't quite saved up yet.
It was the first system I got that was MINE not for the entire family (though I did share it sometimes
) and that means a lot to me. So did all the hours spent playing with friends over the years.
I still have that NES, and while I haven't turned it on in a couple years, last time I did it still ran fine. The only real problem it's ever given me was at one point the mechanism for the carts wouldn't stay down, and I had to use some creative ways to get them to stay down so I could play, but one day, losing at some game or another in a particularly maddening way, I slammed my fist on the top of the system. Somehow the spirit of the Fonz must have been with me that day, as the mechanism was suddenly fixed, and it still works to this day.