It All Started One Day in Imperial, MO

As young parents, Tim and I swore there would be no video game consoles in our house.  Our children could find better things to entertain and amuse themselves.

Then it happened one Christmas.  Tim and I broke down and bought a Super Nintendo.  Chris and Cameron played these games at friends' houses and we decided to cave to the pressure.

Maybe it was because we were so curious ourselves at all the fuss.  After all, our version of video games in our childhood consisted of "Pong" where a ball could be batted back and forth on the green screen of your television using a controller that sat in your lap and had a couple of dials on it to roll a bar up and down and hit the little white ball back and forth across the TV screen.

This Nintendo stuff was so much better, we were told!

And now Super Nintendo was out and the graphics were supposed to be amazing!

And we caved.

And that Christmas, we bought our first game system.  And we got a Super Mario World for it, and later, Donkey Kong games.  They were really fun. 

That year, after purchasing it, we buried in the giant "wardrobe" box in our basement, where we kept things stored.  All Christmas gifts were buried in that box under our junk.  The boys never thought to look there. 
(If they did, they have yet to confess that but they were still quite young so I am betting we were still smarter back then!)

Each night, after the boys went to bed, we went to the basement, uncovered the gifts, dragged out the Nintendo system box, unwrapped everything out of its packaging, hooked it up to our TV stayed up all night playing the game, re-packed the game system just the way it came and promised to never get it out again until after the boys opened it at Christmas.  We did this nearly every night for a month.  We were  hooked. By the time the boys opened their Super Nintendo, we had nearly beaten the game!!!  Ha, but they never knew, for years and years. 

Now we have purchased nearly every game system that has ever existed since that time. Tim and I no longer play them because they have becomes way too sophisticated for us! The only one we have never purchased is a Wii.  I guess they were grown before they cared about the Wii. In the end, though, no matter how sophisticated and realistic games appear on the Playstations and Gamecubes and XBox 360's,  they still love the classics found in the original Nintendo Games! How do I know?  15 years later, Chris and his friends still want to be Mario, Luigi, and Donkey Kong for Halloween!