What’s the Best Christmas Present You’ve Ever Received?
December 22nd, 2006 by Benj Edwards
Among those who celebrate it, Christmas is often remembered as a magical time full of joy, excitement, and anticipation. It all goes back to when we were kids and we begged our parents all year long to buy us something we wanted so badly, but they resisted because the item usually cost over $20. We typically lost all hope of ever getting the item until Christmas rolled around. That was the only time of year that you could ever get that one mythical item, usually courtesy of Santa Claus.
Let’s talk presents. Since this site is called Vintage Computing and Gaming, I’m limiting the discussion to those items relevant to the site. I’ll give you some examples of VC&G-related presents I received when I was younger, then I’d like to hear about some of your favorite VC&G-related Christmas memories.
Some of the greatest computer-related Christmas presents I’ve received throughout the years include a Prodigy sign-up kit and membership (Man, I wanted that so bad. It was in my early BBS days), a 14.4 kbps modem (which was bad-ass at the time), a SoundBlaster Pro (our first sound card ever), and our family’s first CD-ROM drive and some software on CD-ROM. Some of my favorite video game presents have been Mega Man 3 and Castlevania III (my brother and I received them in the same year, which was incredibly exciting at the time) and our first PlayStation with a copy of Twisted Metal 2. My brother typically received various PC games over the years, like Shogun, Planet’s Edge, Thexder, Wasteland, Silpheed, Bard’s Tale III, and more. I had a lot of fun watching him play them, of course, so they were like presents to me too.
So now it’s your turn. Post some of your favorite computing- or gaming-related Christmas memories. Tell us about some of the best Christmas presents you’ve ever received. Just leave a comment on this entry, and don’t be shy.
Thanks, and Merry Christmas from Vintage Computing and Gaming!
December 22nd, 2006 at 4:17 pm
1. My long awaited first Atari 65XE, 15 years ago. It was given to me ay the beginning of December, but I used to think of it as the Christmas gift.
2. My long awaited disk drive for Atari, exactly a year later. I gathered most of the money by myself, but the rest I’ve got from my dad. It was Polish SN-360 drive: http://atariki.krap.pl/index.php/SN-360
3. I do not remember any other Christmas gift… Hmmm.
December 22nd, 2006 at 4:23 pm
My fave Christmas gift ever (well, computer or game anyway) was an Apple IIe that I got in 1984 when I was 9 years. I had loads of fun programming basic on it and playing Bard’s Tale!
December 22nd, 2006 at 4:28 pm
Thanks for the comments, guys. Jurgi, your site really makes me wish I could read Polish. 🙂
December 22nd, 2006 at 10:05 pm
I think the best gift in this category would have to be the Commodore 1541 disk drive I received for Christmas 1983. Before then I was limited to typing programs in and saving them on my Datasette. I remember also getting the game Space Taxi that year for Christmas, and I probably spent my whole Christmas holiday playing that game and learning how to format blank diskettes.
December 23rd, 2006 at 10:24 am
I’m going with my Commodore 64 as the best present every. C 64 rocked!!!!!!
December 23rd, 2006 at 4:23 pm
ColecoVision in 1982. Donkey Kong (included w/ console) for me and Smurf Rescue for my younger brother. 🙂
December 23rd, 2006 at 7:32 pm
Unreal Tournament. It started a love for gaming that I had never really posessed until then.
December 23rd, 2006 at 8:02 pm
The best present I got was my brand new VIC-20. It was actually a gift to myself. Sometimes, I even let my kids use it. 🙂
December 24th, 2006 at 6:30 pm
hmm.. that’s tough. I would have to say the Super NES I got in 1992, or possibly the 64 megs of RAM/20 gig hard drive for my Pentium 2/266 back in 1998 (still have the hard drive in my current computer).
Then again, I like the fact that I am with my family for Christmas more than the gifts..
December 24th, 2006 at 11:02 pm
In 1988, I received an upgrade for my IBM PC Jr’s memory from 128KB to 640KB of memory. That allowed me to play Police Quest and Space Quest on the system!
It must have cost my Dad over $150 for that upgrade. 1GB is less than that now! That was a great Christmas!
December 26th, 2006 at 2:28 pm
I’m gonna say it – The NES action set in 1988! This was my favorite gift of all time. I stayed up so late playing Super Mario Bros. I mastered the game in a month, and completed it on an almost weekly basis. Runners up include an SNES (set w/ 2 controllers and Super Mario World) w/ Street Fighter 2, and the Sega Genesis II with Sonic 2 and Mortal Kombat the next year. The early gift of my first PC was great too. I still have it! bought in Fall of 1996, a Compaq Presario 2200 w/ a Cyrix 180 mhz processer/16 megs of ram/33.3 modem. My parents were really late on the whole computer thing, and got it for me for “school”. Let’s just say I was having more fun with this than consoles at this stage. I loved “X-wing” and “Doom 2” to name a couple of the classics that are still played on this machine. It’s just my win 95 gaming computer now.
December 27th, 2006 at 12:19 pm
I loved getting Knights of Legend for my 286 after painfully spending an entire summer playing with a friend on his C64….flipping disks and overheating his system. I also remember getting the Sega Master system via a scavenger hunt around my parents house.
December 31st, 2006 at 7:24 am
i remember my first playstation, it came with ff9, It was my first rpg, ahh i lovee it. I also got a cd burner(i wanted to make my own cds.)
December 12th, 2012 at 5:00 am
The Atari 800 with the cassette drive and thermal printer.
December 10th, 2016 at 1:59 pm
For me, I forget the year, but the programmable rover Big Track! I also got the dump cart that same Christmas! I spent every waking minute playing that thing – sending it from the living room to the kitchen, dumping something on the floor, and then returning to me! I thought it wouldn’t be more than a few years and we would have robots fetching us things… still waiting!
December 12th, 2016 at 9:36 am
I had a Big Trak when I was a kid too, Lyle. It was pretty amazing. I remember thinking how incredibly futuristic it was at the time.