In November 1996, my parents took my brother and me to the city that neighbored our small town to do some shopping, a task I loathed.
As an anxious kid with undiagnosed ADHD, following my parents around to different stores was an act of torture that resulted in some of the most intense boredom imaginable. I spent hours of my childhood just staring at inoffensive speckled linoleum tile or low pile carpet with vague, amorphous stains, hoping something would happen.
Blockbuster was different from other stores, though.
We didn’t have a Blockbuster in my hometown for most of my childhood, so getting to go in and see the rows and rows of video games and movies always thrilled me. There was always something to read or imagine myself playing. And more than that, there were the demo stands for consoles and games. In November 1996, that demo console stand showed off the Nintendo 64 and its launch game: Mario 64.
I spent most of that visit to the Blockbuster, which was as usual tacked onto our larger shopping trip, playing Mario 64. Elsewhere, my mom and brother picked out what game he was going to rent for the week, and my dad fished around in the bargain bin, coming away with the VHS version of some movie now lost entirely to cultural memory.
I was absolutely enthralled by the ability to move my favorite red plumber around in 3D space, which felt as novel to me then as VR feels to me now. The painful boredom I’d experienced all day was worth it, because I’d gotten to try something new and fun.
I knew I had to have an N64.
Every one of my letters to Santa that Christmas talked about how badly I wanted the console. By that point, I’d already figured out, entirely by accident, that Santa wasn’t real, having the previous year caught my mom and grandmother wrapping presents on Christmas Eve. They didn’t know I knew, and I worried that if they found out, I’d stop getting Christmas presents, so I kept up the act. Still, as a kid, I felt like my parents could get me anything. I didn’t yet have the sense and experience to realize just how ludicrously difficult buying things could be.
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The other day, I brought the N64 up to my mom, and she told me that my dad had gone to virtually every store in a hundred kilometer radius looking for one, while she had called every business to check on their stock. The season of a console’s launch has, I guess, always meant finding one is near impossible. Luckily, those were the days before internet scalpers, which I imagine helped some. My dad succeeded in getting one.
On Christmas, I unwrapped all the gifts under the tree, and I was happy for everything my parents bought me (with the exception of the socks, a gift that is S-Tier as an adult and Trash-Tier as a child). Just as I thought I was done, my mom said to me: “Oh, there’s one more thing.” And my dad pulled a box out from behind the plush chair he napped in while watching hockey.
I still remember the wrapping paper: It was white with blue snowflakes. The label said it was from Santa, erasing the work of both my parents in tracking down the difficult-to-find console and attributing it to a magic man in red. I tore through the wrapping paper, and when I saw a picture of the console on the side of the box, I screamed with delight. I spent most of that day playing Mario 64, which was the only game I’d have for it for months, and yet was also the only game I needed, being a child entirely incapable of navigating Lethal Lava Land.
As a kid, the gift meant something because of just how fun it was. However, as an adult, that N64 has taken on a different meaning for me entirely.
Growing up, I tended to end up with whatever my older brother’s hand-me-downs were. When the PS2 came out, I got his PS1 and all the games. When the SNES arrived, I got the NES. I was perpetually a console generation behind. To this day, I still have trouble pinpointing when those consoles and their games released, because I often played them five years too late. The N64 was the first console I ever owned that was truly mine.
Decades later, I think that’s why I still have such fond memories of the games on the N64. In retrospect, the N64 doesn’t have much that I’m into now. I primarily play RPGs and sim/strategy games, with a healthy dose of action thrown in. However, I still have a soft spot for the games of that era — titles like Mario 64 and Banjo-Kazooie. I still have a scar on my hand from Mario Party 1, and the infamous mini-game that resulted in a lawsuit.
There’s also the matter of my parents’ financial situation.
At that point in time, my dad was unemployed, and my mom was a secretary. As an adult, I understand that, while they did have some savings thanks to the massive economic advantages that the Baby Boomers received, they still weren’t particularly well off. Buying a new console didn’t just take the effort of tracking one down, but also making the choice to spend more money than they might have been comfortable with for the chance to give their quiet, anxious, nerdy child a chance to indulge in one of his hobbies.
Since 2015, I’ve spent exactly two Christmases with my family, owing in large part to the fact that I’ve lived in several different countries, in some cases continents, since then. And while I don’t have children of my own, the last time I did spend Christmas with my family, I saw the joy in my nephew’s eyes as he received presents, and I couldn’t help but wonder just what he would remember of the holiday.
My experience of having some nerdy present burned into my memory also doesn’t seem uncommon. As I was writing this article, I messaged all the contributors at The Escapist, telling them I was working on this piece, and they shared their own stories with me of parents buying them LEGO Star Wars sets, officially setting them down the path of being entertainment-obsessives; parents struggling to make sure Wing Commander 3 would work right out of the box; the experience of getting an ill-fated Dreamcast; and more that I can’t keep putting down here without this turning into a listicle titled something like the 12 Best Gifts Escapists Got For Christmas (& 12 That Were Really Bad — You’ll NEVER Believe #3).
That’s all to say that, for as cynical as I’ve become about commercialism and how it intersects with the holiday season, what we do for other people, especially children, who are still in the process of understanding their place in the world, matters. Gifts have the potential to set us down a particular path in a profound way, because they reflect the relationship between the giver and the receiver, imbuing it with a meaning in the process.
Nothing will ever top that N64 for me, because at the time, it gave me a haven from a world that was deeply frightening to me. As an adult, though, it proves how far my parents were willing to go for their quiet, anxious child, without any expectation that they’d get recognized for the act two decades later. So thank you, mom and dad, for embodying the spirit of the holidays in a way that has forever changed me.
