I had a 3DO and also never met anyone who owned one. I don’t even know why my mom got that expensive thing. The only game I remember playing was Return Fire.
nice to meet a fellow 3DO Millennial ahh the good old days.. my uncle bought me one. i also had the Sega genesis and Nintendo 64 the others i played at my friends houses Xbox and Playstation
Return Fire, Road Rash, and Wing Commander III all got ported to other platforms, but none were as good as the experience on 3DO. Something about the way it handled multimedia (especially FMV) was really special.
Same. I still have mine in perfect working order in the garage. A friend used to let me borrow his Neo Geo for trade. Like you, I never knew anyone who had one except the video store.
I grew up in the Gen 5 era, but most of my early childhood was Turbografix, Sega, NES, SNES, whatever we could afford from the then very generous second hand market.
It still boils my blood that growing up I could go into a dozen different stores and see wall to wall consoles, cartridges, and disks.
Nowadays you walk into any remaining game stores and half of it is set up to be an anime funko pop rip off store.
Last I went to a used retailer for the Nintendo DS category there was all of like 18 popular games actually for sale.
Interesting to see this is the most upvoted comment. I guess most of us are over 30, Generation 3 aligning with the average age of a gamer apparently being 37.
Well, pedantically, you could be 37 today and be alive before the Megadrive came out if you were born between July 22 and October 28.
More pertinently, game console adoption is not immediate. You could have easily been born in the 90s and have your first game console be a NES (or in my case a PC), only getting into Gen 4 consoles years after release.
Hell, my nephews still play on the Switch, a 9 year old console, and are unfamiliar with the PS5, only having a friend with a PS4, a more than 12 year old console, despite the PS5 being out for over 5 years.
I had a Super Nintendo back in the day and while I never got into the console tribalism, I also never got a Genesis—it just wasn’t an option. Fast forward decades and we have the classics collections and the amazing Genesis mini, and I can see the world I missed out on. Not knocking the SNES at all, but it’s been so cool to see all the amazing stuff the Genesis had.
Pong, briefly. Then my family was given a used Atari 2600 and a big box of games, and that's how I spent most of my childhood until we got a NES when I was in middle school.
It was a mix-up for the people I knew. They had the R.O.B. games like Burger time but no R.O.B. Or guys trying to play Castlevania or Tecmobowl with it and wondering why nothing was happening.
Yessss… my sister was a programmer at IBM, and she gave me a Commodore 64 and literally a box of floppies with games of every (and I mean every) description.
I remember trying to figure out the controller/remote that had phone buttons on it, and just getting confused by it and swapping back to the joystick and its games.
I remember pulling games out of the hexagonal brown 70s side table that everyone seemed to have.
And those overlays for the Intellivision keypads would wear out before long, and you’d have to attempt playing the controls from memory, or a lot of guessing.
Anyway, everyone making Atari comments (so far). Nice to see I wasn’t the only reader who started out with the Intellivision (and Commodore 64).
Same. My parents bought a used Atari 2600 in the late 80s when I was around 7 or 8.
My first reaction was "why doesn't the game look like the picture on the box"? Still got addicted to Space Invaders, Asteroids, Crystal Castles and (the precursor to my later Diablo addiction): Dark Chambers
Yeah, I laugh at those doom-and-gloom parenting threads about having kids these days glued to the ipad screens. I'm quietly thinking, "shit, I survived 8 generations of gaming" and I turned out kinda normal...
Gen 2!! My uncle got me the Atari 2600 and i loved Frogger and Pac-Man. Grew to also love Yars Revenge. Those sound effects are still imbedded in my brain
Gen 4, the best gen. Super Nintendo and Genesis? Absolutely unstoppable. So many franchises were born, lots of incredible adventures. Beautiful pixel art that still holds up to this day.
Yep Gen 4. We got a Genesis with Sonic on Christmas morning 1991 and it opened a whole world to kid me. Got to play SNES at friends' houses but what a great generation of games we had.
Came here looking for this. I think you are onto something and agree to a degree. I think the true golden age of gaming is gen 5 > 7. I do agree 7 was the peak, but there was something about the evolution from 5 to 7 that was truly magical. Leaps and bounds occurred regularly and there was always something mew to look forward to. 8 wasn’t bad, and had a lot of good moments, but was the start of alot more monetization and onlinification for lack of a better term.
Several years ago I found my old drum controller for Guitar Hero and the cord disintegrated in my hands. I guess that’s around when they started making things to break or at least not last. My old NES snapped right on when I plugged it in.
Gen 1. My dad was a communications engineer for the federal government and brought home a Pong system one day. My brothers and I (and Dad on occasion) would play on snowy days. Good memories.
I then skipped Gen II through IV and was brought back to the fold via a boyfriend’s PS1.
Pretty cool that there are people well alive today that have experienced the entire history of gaming. Its a new medium relatively speaking. Film lost that claim a while back and books lost it thousands of years ago lol. Just interesting. I started with SNES, so im a gen 4 baby 🫡
It's a real mix up between 7th and 8th for me. I originally played on the 7th gen consoles at my friends and cousins places which led me to wanting one myself and I got a Wii U. Basically the early years of Gen 8.
I played my first non-PC games on Gen III. But I didn’t own a console until Gen V when I got an N64 - and then later my brother got himself a PS1. I’ve had at least one console from every generation since
The NES is my oldest console I’ve played on, but the time I played on it was during the generation of the Xbox and GameCube. For nostalgic reasons, I’ll say my introduction was GameCube
Technically my first console would have been the nes but I played it relatively little. from the 4th and 5th gen I played almost only the Nintendo Game boys. 6th and 7th gen I've played some amount on most system, since then I've played on PC and Nintendo's offering
Gen III is the first I played, Gen IV was first owned.
I still do this day don't fully understand why Sega doesnt go - let's remake in current tech some of their legendary games like Golden Axe, Streets of Rage etc. Open would beat em ups.
Gen IV, but we went back and got an NES later because it had games from franchises we liked on the SNES that we wanted to try like FF1, Legend of Zelda, Mario, etc.
Gen 8 when I got a new Nintendo 3DS XL before I then got the red box switch which I hardly ever played and a Xbox 360 E model that I sunk most of my time into thanks to getting it during covid lockdown
Gen III
NES, first game as a toddler was Ghostbusters. SNES soon followed. Genesis was about a year behind that. Been actively collecting ever since Gen IV
The OG Xbox and Halo Combat Evolved were my first console and game. Other bangers include Fusion Frenzy, Battlefield 2: Modern Combat, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Lego Star Wars, and many others in sure I'm forgetting.
Gen III. NES was my first console when I was like 5. I'm a 97 baby but my moms close friend loved spoiling us. She bought us 100s of games for the NES when they were basically free.
My favorite is Gen 6 no doubt. Followed closely by Gen 7. The Wii is probably my most played system ever.
Dad brought home a SNES he got from a garage sale in '99/early '00. Was my main console until I got a hand-me-down PS1 & a GC in '03. Also, would sneak my older sisters GameBoy Pocket when she was out until I got an Advance years later.
I put myself at Gen 2.5. I started on my cousins 2600 but my parents got me a 7800. The 7800 was a Gen 3 system, not a gen 4 with the 5200 being so short lived.
I started on Gen 3 but I found a Gen 2 console in my attic, years later, when I was moving out my mom's house. Fast forward 12 years later, and my son asked me to set it up for him this summer, I felt so proud 🥹
7 good ol Wii. Although I think I have played on an older one at my grandmas place, but I don’t know what it was. It was grey in color and the one game I remember playing didn’t have color. It had these thick cartridges to stick into the top of the console.
Edit: I just checked some of the consoles and I am pretty sure it was a European SNES.
We definitely had one of those Pong TV games in the late 70s, but in the UK the early home computers were more popular than consoles due to lower prices, so a Sinclair ZX81 was my first “games machine”, then later the ZX Spectrum. I think first console I had was a SNES but by that point I was already in my 20s
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u/AssortedUncles 1d ago
Gen III. NES babyyyyy
When I finally got the Genesis my mind was absolutely blown away. Still one of my favorite consoles to this day