It’s Monday and time for Ask Kotaku, the weekly feature in which Kotakusites deliberate on one burning question. Then we ask for your opinion.
This week we ask Kotaku: What’s the best (or worst) gaming gift you’ve ever received?
Fahey
This is easy. My family has been conditioned to the fact that if I want a video game, I buy a video game. If I want hardware I’ll find a way to pay for hardware. I’ve been blessed with the means to get the things I wanted, but there was one piece of hardware that always eluded me: the translucent pink Japanese Hello Kitty Dreamcast.
It’s not that special edition console that came with a pink VMU, and a keyboard Hi Kitty typing game was extremely expensive. You can find them on eBay for a few hundred dollars loose. It’s that as much as I wanted the pretty pink thing, I couldn’t justify the purchase. I have several Dreamcasts. I didn’t need any other, no matter how beautiful it is.
Enter my parents. In 2018, with nothing practical on my Christmas wish list, I suggested they search eBay for my pink plastic prize. Helped heavily by my husband (my parents are in their 70s and 80s), they managed to get through even though they had to do it in two trades because they mixed up their eBay auctions.
Riley
For my birthday in 2014, some of my friends collected some money and gave it to me to build a gaming PC. Before that, I was playing things on a gaming laptop that burned itself up really quickly, and I replaced it with a machine that I could work on but couldn’t play games with. It was a really sweet gift – I was totally crying – and they even helped me pick out parts and build the whole thing. Having a gaming PC was great for my freelance career at the time as I was able to play games that I couldn’t before, and that definitely helped me get this job, so it’s really the gift that keeps on giving.
Alexandra
My family was friends with two other families we knew through my father’s work. The father of one family – everyone was straight! – always bought the latest tech gear, including video games, and at some point started giving my fam its hand-me-downs when the latest and greatest took an interest in the old and known. His first donation to our clan was one Atari 800 computers, the first gaming machine I had access to at home. I loved it.
It came with 15 or 20 cartridges, mostly games (one of which was the BASIC programming language). I quickly became attached to the weird Atari 8-bit versions of Donkey Kong, Robotron 2084, Centipede, Missile Command, Star Raiders (I remember getting the ‘space concierge’ end game rating), and the ultimate secret gem, Rescue of the river. I’ve even played a lot Mrs. Pac-Man, a game I don’t care about today because I was utterly fascinated by anything and everything that generated the beautifully glowing phosphors of a TV screen.
That’s it: I was officially a video game kid. About 15 years later, this kind man’s last tech gift – this time direct to me – would be his old Neo Geo AES console, which smelled like cigarettes. It was a great surprise, but the smell was so unbearable that I swapped it for a copy of, strangely enough, PC engine Tatsujin. (Which, even stranger, now seems to be worth more than an AES.)
My other best gaming gift has to be the NES. Despite my Atari love affair, I was slow to think there were other, newer video game systems. In the summer of 1987 or 1988, I stayed with a few cousins and they had an NES along with a dozen of the usual early games: Kung-Fu, Super Mario Bros., Double dribble, Ice hockey, etc. It was the closest thing I have ever experienced to love at first sight. (I remember I didn’t like it Punch-Out !! at first though.) When I got home, I’m sure I was insufferable, all “Friendship ended with ATARI, now NINTENDO is my best friend.” My beleaguered parents soon gave in and another Nintendo zombie was born.
As for the worst game gift, I once asked my grandmother about NES Friday the 13th, one of the more famous bad games for the system, after renting it once already. Children are sometimes inexplicable.
Ari
Which child wants snow boots for a birthday present? It’s a gift rooted in usefulness, without an ounce of fun. Maine (that’s where I grew up) is known for its harshly punishing winters. A walk to the school bus in mid-December can easily give a child frostbite, especially if that child is a cranky kid who prefers paper-thin slip-ons from Vans over more seasonal shoes.
So, yeah, for my something-birthday (nice try; if you tell the exact number, I’ll get a carbon date right away), my mom bought me snow boots. Boots. For a slightly-th grader. A practical gift of course, but not exactly a cool gift.
As it turns out, my mom tucked away a copy of each of the two new ones Pokémon versions, gold and Silver, in every boot. Now Which was cool. Less cool was the condition that, once I picked one, I had to commit and play it all the way to the Elite Four before starting on the other. In other words – and this is only now dawning on me as a result of the double-edged power afterwards – my mother apparently had dormant dreams of Pokémon professor. This decided, of course, as I was eventually able to put together a selection with both Lugia and Ho-oh on it, which I used briefly to crush them all Pokémonchild playing at school. And I didn’t get frostbite there either.
Zack
It’s simple: the best gaming gift I’ve ever received was a Sega Genesis. I remember thinking at the time that this was the best, most amazing console ever. I didn’t have game magazines or YouTube to tell me otherwise. This Sega Genesis console at my house was great, and I could do a Power Rangers play on it. (That was too the first game I ever beat, Besides.)
What I didn’t know, however, was that my parents were very smart and thrifty. Game mid-‘The 90s were very expensive, just like today. So my parents would buy my brother and I older consoles and games. We didn’t care. They were new to us. And it saved my parents a lot of money, which was good because we often didn’t have much left. It also means that I grew up playing stuff on the Atari 2600 and NES, even though I was born years after those consoles were relevant or new.
As I grew up, this strategy would eventually become untenable as I started to learn more about the hobby and ask for newer consoles and games. But for several reasons I never got a Christmas present again after that Genesis. So it holds a special place in my heart and is easily my best gaming gift ever.
Ethan
There are so many that it is difficult to choose. In 1998 I got a magenta Game Boy color and Pokémon Yellow. I was ecstatic. Finally my own handheld to sit alone and play games in any corner of the world I wanted. The following year, my family bought a Nintendo 64 and I got it The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. A few years later, in a feat of pure magic, my brothers and I somehow got both a PS2 and a GameCube in the same year. A Christmas, two systems. Last year my brother bought me Kartia for the PS1, complete with box and booklet. I hadn’t played it in decades. It was a pleasure just to hold it.
But my favorite gaming gift came back in 1995. I think this was the year we got a Super Nintendo. My parents gave me a big package, too big to be a video game. It looked like it might be clothes. I halfheartedly tore the wrapping paper to reveal a black box with a large yellow starfish on it. ‘EarthBound. “Earth-what? I had no idea what it was. My parents picked it up at a local clearance BEST department store who had gone bankrupt. The sticker said $ 19.99.
Finally I flipped through the gigantic guide that came outh. I started playing later that day. I scratched and sniffed the scratch-and-sniff cards that came in the package. A monkey chewing gum smelled sweet; a dog on fire smelled like thrown chili. About the coming days and weeks I slowly found out what EarthBound was real, and it’s been with me since … at least the cartridge. The box and everything else that came with it was lost a long time ago. At one point I cut everything up to make wall collages. I lost that too. Maybe one day they will come back to me.
And you?
Kotakuhas been weighed, but what is your opinion? In retrospect, what was the best gaming gift you ever received? Or, if you want dishes, worst? Give your opinion! We come back next Monday in two weeks to deliberate and debate another geeky issue. See you in the comments!