I was born in 1983, so video games were on the forefront of my holiday wish lists for most of my childhood and teen years. Obviously, I was not alone. A recent study revealed the most popular Christmas toys every year since 1960, and as expected, video games and consoles have been making steady appearances since Pong in 1975. The Game Boy topped Christmas lists in 1991, while Mortal Kombat was the game to get in 1993, virtual blood be damned. The PS2 in 2001 and DS in 2004 are not very surprising, nor is the Wii in 2006. What I didn’t expect was the PS3 to make an appearance in 2007, the year after its launch, while the Xbox 360, which came out in 2005, is mysteriously absent (some kind of robot dinosaur seems to have taken its place).



Naturally, looking over this list led to a trip down memory lane for me. I received a Wii in 2006 as an early Christmas gift, bought a PS3 as a present for someone else in 2007, and my parents bought a PS2 for my brothers and me in 2001. The biggest video game Christmas I can remember, though, is in 1995, when my brothers and I received the first PlayStation. I’ve talked about this before, but we were way behind on the NES era and skipped the SNES and Genesis entirely, so the fact that we managed to convince my anti-video game parents to drop $400 on a brand new system and games was a huge accomplishment. For the first time ever, we got to be the kids in school with the new system that no one else had. The bundle my parents got came with NBA Jam Tournament Edition and Street Fighter The Movie: The Game and we played the hell out of both of them—until the day my brother broke the Street Fighter disc in half in a fit of rage.

Oh, memories.

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