I started playing games on an Atari 5200 (I think). My earliest memories and what really kicked off my love for video games, though, was when my uncles purchased a Nintendo Entertainment System in the late 80s. I played it as much as possible and for Christmas of the same year my parents bought me my own NES. My uncles purchased me Castlevania as well. Unfortunately it would be many years before I would keep the consoles and games so alas, I no longer have that NES or any of the games.
Through the past 25 years I've personally owned the following consoles:
- NES
- Super NES
- Sega Genesis
- Sega 32X
- Nintendo Gameboy
- Nintendo 64
- Sony Playstation
- Sega Dreamcast
- Sony Playstation 2
- Nintendo Gamecube
- Xbox 360
- Nintendo Wii
- PC
- iPod Touch
I still own a Playstation 2, Gamecube, Wii, Xbox 360, Nintendo DS, PC and iPod Touch. I seldom play much except the Xbox 360, though. There's also an old Atari of some sort buried in a closet. It belonged to my parents. The last time I had it out (probably 15 years ago) it worked. I have no clue what games are tucked away with it, though.
There are a few notable absences from the list. Below are a few consoles and why I've never owned them:
- Sega Saturn - My uncles (the pair who got me into gaming) owned one. I played plenty of great games like Guardian Heroes, Astal, Clockwork Knight, A Bug's Life, Daytona USA, et cetera.
- 3DO - Again, my uncles had one of these. A lot of campy games I remember fondly like The Horde, Twisted, Mad Dog McCree, Demolition Man, Way of the Warrior and a lot of others I can't remember at the moment. This was during Full Motion Video's heyday so most of these games are live acted in the so bad it's good way.
- Xbox - Nothing really compelled me to buy an Xbox. The big system seller Halo was never something I was interested in. Unlike most console gamers of the day I had played FPS games on the PC so all Halo did was take the best aspect from other games and put them all together on the console. It wasn't anything new to me. It wasn't a bad game (and I did play through the first game... on PC) but it didn't convince me to buy the system. Neither did anything else. At this point I already had a huge backlog of Playstation 2 games to play (I still do...) so I wasn't interested.
- Playstation 3 - There are only a small handful of exclusives for the Playstation 3 I would be interested in playing. Metal Gear Solid 4, God of War 3 and perhaps Demon's Souls (I love Dark Souls). There are probably a couple others. I don't have any interest in Killzone or Uncharted, though which knocks out some of their main exclusives. I've considered buying a PS3 but after the whole PSN hacking debacle and seeing Sony remove features virtually from day one (First backwards compatibility then the Other OS feature) I really don't wish to support their arrogant backwards thinking.
- Sony PSP - No interest. I wish to play a grand total of one game: Parasite Eve: The 3rd Birthday. Maybe the God of War games would be cool but I could just get a PS3 to play those and God of War 3.
- Nintendo 3DS - I considered buying but I'm not much of a portable gamer. I have games for my DS phat that I've barely played. Back when I owned a Gameboy I didn't play it much. I have games on me pretty much all the time with my iPod Touch and I hardly ever play them.
I've been gaming nearly since birth and have it has been my number one passion for over 25 years now. I've played hundreds of games (likely over a thousand) and currently own a couple hundred games on the various platforms I own. I wish that I still owned all my old consoles but alas, growing up it made more sense at the time to trade old systems in for the new systems. It wasn't until I realized I was spending more money trading games in then buying a couple of them back here or there that I stopped doing that. That was somewhere in the Playstation era. Unfortunately it came after I traded in my copies of Wing Commander 3 and 4 which I never bothered to get back. More classic FMV games.