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Finally we got ours in 1987 for Christmas, when I was not even 5. It was an action set, the deck
2 controllers, a zapper and Super Mario Bros. I spent the next months playing
I don't remember how many games I actually owned, it was about 6 or 7. SMB,
Tetris, Ironsword, Contra, Ikari Warriors, SMB 3, that's about all of them I
can remember. I was introduced to my favorite game of all time in a
strange way. I found a Contra cart just lying
on the side of the road. I brought it home and soon me, and all my siblings,
were all over it. Of course I had to hide it from my parents who would
Eventually the good times came to an end. I still remember the dreaded day,
it was Christmas 1991, and like everyone else on the planet, we got the
Super Nintendo. "This is cool", I thought, "now the NES and SNES can live
together in perfect harmony". But such a fate was not to be. I remember
walking out of my room, fresh off of a game of Super Mario World as I
witnessed my brother giving the NES to my older sister (who was visiting
from college), saying "Merry Christmas". She hadn't played NES a day in
her life! I was distraught but I kept my feelings hidden (as always). I found
out later my sister gave away the NES and all the games about a week later
to some frat-boy, and now my NES is God-knows-where. At least I still have my original
box, the one that caused so many rumors amongs the nations pre-teen
society because it showed Mario with "angel wings", and the box still has
the brand-new-system smell!
I soon bought a N64 and a Gameboy Pocket, and these brought a lot of fun-filled
hours, but in a way it seemed like I was only going through the motions
of videogaming and not truly enjoying myself all that much. I still thought
of my NES often. I would talk about it with some of the other kids in my
neighborhood, and soon found out they all agreed with me. We made it our
goal to get a working NES, one of us had a NES with the top taken off,
After a month or two we unhooked the NES, I had my thirst for NES quenched,
the kid with the POS NES moved away and I got back into N64 heavily. The next big event
to happen comes in February 1999 when I get online. Before that I had always
shunned internet junkies, and I was about to become one. The first thing I did
was go to Nintendo.com and there I got deeply burrowed into the Nsider
crowd. I searched for NES one day, and got hundreds of pages of confusing
emulation and ROM issues, but no true NES sites, so I thought the presence
of the NES online sucked. That summer, finally, after years of anticipation,
I bought my own NES, for $15, with a copy of Contra that didn't work and
After becoming an invisible member of the online scene, I soon had a
yearning to start my own massive collection, and that's when it began. I went
to my local flea market, one of the biggest in the entire nation, and
jump started my collection with a massive haul including a dog-bone controller
(which broke, damnit) and like 10 games. And from there I lived happily ever
after, and have been collecting and playing ever since, and that's my story.
I can't remember exactly when it started for me, my earliest memories of
the NES come from when my family would rent the system and Super Mario
Bros. from a small-time video store and we (me, my older brother and 2
sisters) would play it non-stop until we had to take it back. My neighbors
were really big on the NES, they got thiers as soon as it came out, the
entire family played, even the parents. Me and my brother would go over
there and that's where I first heard of things such as Zelda and the
Nintendo Fun Club (later Nintendo Power).
SMB and perfecting my game. I remember all of the rumors about how, if
you beat SMB 5 times in a row without warping, you got to play a couple
levels of SMB 2, so one time I had beaten it 4 times going on my 5th when
the screen froze! By the time my SMB "era" ended, it was 1988 and the NES
was in full swing. Everyone on the block had an NES, I could attain any
game I wanted basically by borrowing, in this way I was introduced to
games like Blaster Master, Robo Warrior, SMB 2, Skate or Die, Punchout!!,
the list goes on. It was also around this time that my brother got really
into Castlevania 1 and 2 (2 especially), and watching him play is one
of the most nostalgic memories of mine. We would rent Castlevania 2 ALL
the time, it was as if we owned the game. When he wasn't playing I would
try my hand at it, and it soon became my favorite game. It was over a matter
of months, but my bro beat CV2 with NO help (and I did the same a year or
so later).
wonder how I had gotten it. My brother found out later that one of his
friends left the cart on the back of his car and drove off, so that's
how it got there, but he didn't want the game anymore, so we traded for it.
Well that's the end of my original NES. As sad as that is, I managed to 
go on, and I got into the SNES, which was pretty fun, but there was never
the sense of homeliness you got from playing NES. Many, many times me and
my siblings would say to each other "Remember the NES?", "Remember Contra?",
"I really wish we still had our Nintendo", and the like. Towards the end
of the SNES's life cycle, when the Playstation was new and the N64 was
creating hype, I got out of videogames altogether, for a while. I took
up skateboarding and got to be pretty damn good at that. Then when the
other skaters I knew either quit or turned into bickering shitholes, it
was only a matter of time before I turned back to my former passion, games.
exposing the metal and connectors. Another had a sweet collection of games, a powerpad
and an RF switch. All we needed was the A/C adaptor. We all feverishly
tried to plug in A/C adaptors from things like hairdryers, or playstations,
but they ultimately didn't work. Our project was halted, until we heard they
had the part up at the Goodwill store, and we walked all the way across town
and back to get the adaptor. FINALLY we played some NES (after a good 5 hours
of trying to get the POS to work), I had the honors of playing first, and I put in
Punchout!!. As soon as the title screen came up a nostalgia wave hit me like
never before, as that was the first NES I'd played in 7 years almost. I was also
reaquainted with games like Zelda 2 and SMB 2, and first got to play other
games like Star Tropics, Zodas Revenge and Jackal. Life was good for the next few weeks.
had "Fuck You" written on the inside. The only game I had was Pac Man, which was
given to me, and SMB which mysteriously just popped up in my house one day, I seriously
don't know where the hell it came from. I soon bought a couple of games, among
them one of my favorite games to play as a kid, Wrath of the Black Manta. I
soon became frustrated because I couldn't beat the last boss, so I searched for
WOTBM online and I found the ONLY DAMN strategy guide on the entire net,
which happened to be on Alan the Ogre Hombre's Planet NES. After taking a
look around this site, I was mesmerized, I looked at every facet of the site,
and from there I found all of the other NES sites, but that one is still
my favorite.