Christmas 1992 – The year it all began.

After my dad brought a Game Boy back from Hong Kong in the Summer of 1990 I became addicted to video games. I played Super Mario Land and Tetris as often as I was allowed, which wasn’t very often to tell the truth. I couldn’t get past world 3 in Mario and anything faster than level 3 on Tetris was too much for my 5 year old brain. That all changed in 1992, when I was given a Super Nintendo for Christmas and my idea of fun changed forever.

Bundled with the incredible Super Mario World and the certainly not-to-shabby racer “Top Gear”, the Super Nintendo was my first foray into proper gaming. I still remember Christmas 1992 as if it was yesterday, after we’d sat down for dinner with my family, my mum brought into the room another present, a big one. “This is for all three of you,” she said (even though my brothers were only 2 and 3 at the time). Once we’d wolfed down our dinner, we ran upstairs to set it up.

I think we played Mario for about 5 hours straight that night, managing to get up to Vanilla dome with a bit of controller swapping and an unimaginable number of deaths. I genuinely couldn’t believe this was real. The way Mario moved had me in awe, how he could fly, shoot fireballs and run at such speed. This was 100, no, 200 times better than the Gameboy version. We spent the run up to New Year playing the game every day, managing to get as far as Vanilla Dome. I completed the game over a year after I got the SNES and finishing Star Road took another year, but this is still my favourite Mario game of all time.

Top Gear, for those who haven’t heard of it, is a great little racer. One of the best of the SNES era and still holds up pretty well today. The music is astounding, and one of the tracks (if you believe everything you read on the Internet) is the intro to the song “Bliss” by Muse. That took us a lot longer to get through, maybe 5 years in all, but we loved it and played both games to death until Zelda came the following Christmas.


Christmas 1997 – N64 kid

Have you ever seen that video of “The N64 Kid” on Youtube? Of course you have, you’re on a Nintendo website. Well that was my and my brothers on Christmas 1997, minus the way over the top American-ness. I think we almost suffocated our mum with hugs that year. We’d been out for a meal during the day, as my mum didn’t want to cook, and when we came back home, there it was on the living room floor. A large box, 2 small ones, and 3 even smaller ones. Now, my friend was lucky enough to get an N64 on his 10th birthday in April, so I had some experience of Mario 64 and Goldeneye. Being as hardcore-as-I-could-be Nintendo fan at the age of 11, an N64 was all I wanted.

3 games, and 2 extra controllers. Great right? Maybe not. No Mario 64, no Goldeneye. I don’t want to sound ungrateful here, I really wasn’t but looking back the game choices weren’t the best! Mario Kart 64 (which quickly found its way into the cupboard after Diddy Kong Racing was bought a week later). Top Gear Rally, which admittedly was fantastic, I just didn’t appreciate it at the time, and MRC. What? Yeah, M. R. C. Multi-Racing Championship. A true Christmas pudding of a game. A horrendously bad arcade racer which we decided not to sell as an ironic memory to this iconic day in history.

Well, we were ecstatic as you can imagine and played all three games to death. As I mentioned before, we got Diddy Kong Racing after New Year, as well as Lylatwars and Goldeneye and that’s when we really fell in love with the system. The countless hours of (at last!) all 3 of us being able to play together remain a fond memory. We must have racked up over a 500 hours on the original Mario Party and on occasion have gone back to it when the family are together. It’s a Christmas I’ll never forget, as it was the last one where we all shared a really solid brotherly bond, mainly becuase I’d just started secondary school and we had started to grow apart. I have the N64 and that Christmas to thank for those great memories.


Christmas 2000 - The Lone adventurer

This is the last Christmas I remember as being truly special. I was 14, and now probably almost too old (or so it seemed to me) for the whole kid-like Christmas fanfare. What a way to go out though! My only present that year was Majora’s Mask. I couldn’t have asked for anything more. Now a “hardcore” gamer (yeah, before it was cool), who had developed a taste for certain games and had a subscription to N64 magazine, I had been waiting for “Zelda Gaiden” since the day I saw that first screenshot. Ocarina of Time had opened my eyes to what gaming was really all about. For me, gaming was like a book, and a movie, and a music album all wrapped into one little plastic cartridge, the only difference way YOU were in control of absolutely everything. You were the author, the director and the composer, and there wasn’t an experience on earth like it.

I think before Majora’s Mask was released I had finished Ocarina of Time no fewer than 10 times (If only I had that much free time now…). Sometimes alone, sometimes with friends. I knew the game inside out, top to bottom, every skulltula, every extra heart piece. For me it was gaming perfection that could never be topped. I still roughly remember the last line of the review from N64 magazine on Majora’s Mask. Something like this: “Majora’s mask should sit in Ocarina of Time’s shadow, instead it burns just as brightly” Forgive me if it’s not exactly correct. Anyway, N64 magazine were wrong.

Majora’s Mask blew Ocarina of Time out of the water. The dark themes, the narrative, the 3 day system, the NPCs and their stories, the music, the overworld, the masks, whatever IT was, it left a much greater impression on me than Ocarina of time had. Maybe because I was older, maybe because I was more mature, maybe I was still young and naïve enough, maybe I was less critical, who knows? But still, to this day I consider Majora’s Mask my favourite game of all time. A game that, for me, came at exactly the right time. I completed it all (all masks, all hearts, not using a guide as I had used for OOT) in a 3-day marathon and to this day have never replayed it. I own it for the 3DS, but I daren’t touch it. Since then, I have never enjoyed gaming as much as I did on those 3 days, and I don’t think I ever will.

People often talk about Nintendo and nostalgia, and they do seem to go hand in hand. My best memories of Nintendo and indeed my childhood are of course associated with the festive time of year, and because of this, especially in gaming journalism, it’s difficult to be critical or indeed positive about the company, when so many of our formative moments are shaped by these great memories.

I hope your Christmas is just as memorable as the many I’ve been lucky to have. Please feel free to share some of your own memories as well.

Merry Christmas and happy gaming!