Denying me my video games? We’ll see about that!

Damn, I’ve really been neglecting the site lately. Don’t blame me though, I’m a uni student and education is important and all that kinda jazz…

This entry actually comes from a strange memory that popped into my head earlier today about a time when I was nine years old. At that age you’re dependant on your parents for a hell of a lot of things such as the number of video games you’re able to own. For me, I was restricted to getting video games during my birthday, Christmas or hiring them from the video store… though not always.

So have any of you done whatever it took to play video games when you were young? I have a couple of tales to tell on the matter…

Mail order vidya!

When I was nine I finally owned my first video game console, a Super Nintendo Entertainment System, and it was great! Though, at the time I could only hire games occasionally and the only two games I ever owned for the system were Donkey Kong Country 2 and Yoshi’s Island. I had a thirst for more video games, but what could I do? I was only 9 and didn’t really have any means of getting them on my own.

However, one day early in 1993 I came across a mail order catalogue that had one of those really cheap 100-in-one portable game systems. You know the kind I’m talking about, the type that had a left button, a right button and an action button. The screen was bigger than the original Game Boys but the games that were built into the system were all variations of block games… the two best ones being variants of Tetris and Arkanoid. There were other games as well, however unlike what the advertising said, it was not 100 individual games, rather 10 or 15 games with different difficulty levels and variations. It was a pretty good system actually… for $29.95 (Australian dollars).

But how did I end up getting it in the first place? Well at first, as any child would do, I asked my parents… and they said “No” which seemed like the end of that. However, the budding gamer in me refused to let it go. I decided that I would have to get this portable system on my own… So, after spending a month or two saving up part of my lunch money for school, I finally saved up enough for that portable system. All I needed to do now was send the money off with an order slip that was in the catalogue and it’d be mine.

The most stupid part of this story is that the money I had saved up consisted of coins… $29.95 worth of coins. I remember I had put it in this small cardboard box that was originally a box full of candy of some type. I had made sure to wrap it up in enough masking tape so the money wouldn’t fall out somehow during transit. Attacked the small box was a letter with the order inside and the usual stamp, etc. Thinking back on it now, I’m amazed that the order actually got through and the company actually accepted the mess of coins in that box. I kind of wonder what the hell they thought when they received it or what the folks at the post office thought as they were sorting it, haha.

About four weeks later I got the first mail delivery ever intended for me in my entire life… and my parents were pretty damn mad at me. But what could they do? I had paid for it and sent the order and they had sent me what I wanted. As far as I was concerned, I didn’t care what they thought, that portable system was mine and I played it for many years… though I lost interest in it later on when I got a hold better games on better systems.

When being cheap costs you a lot of money…

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is one of my most loved video games of all time… it’s also a game that my parents refused to buy for me because it was too expensive. I remember during the last months of school back in 1998 the local electronics store had a pre-release grey cart version set up for people to play. I would go there after school with a friend of mine and play it for ages until the folks in the store would kick us out. OoT was being released in mid December, just before Christmas and was #1 on my wish list… in fact, it was the only thing that concerned me. I only wanted that game and didn’t care for anything else.

When Christmas finally came around, there was no Ocarina of Time. I can’t remember what I did get but I remember being very disappointed by whatever it was… however, what I couldn’t own, I would hire from Blockbuster video. So, during the first few months of 1999, I got my parents to hire Ocarina of Time for me… and it was the only game I hired for a while. In fact, I hired the game so many times, over and over again, it began to add up. I estimate that it cost my parents three times as much to hire Ocarina of Time until I had a 100% compete save game file than what it would have cost them if they had bought the damn game for me for Christmas 1998.

My parents learned from their mistake by the time Majora’s Mask came around though and on Christmas 2000, they bought it for me, no questions asked… a wise choice.