i must have been about 6 years old when my dad brought home a used commodore vic-20 with a bunch of games. i think this was the first one i played.

the kid nextdoor was a few years older, and he had a 2600.

typical story! it was probably about 1988 when my dad bought our nes. i know i'd played some nintendo at friends' and neighbors' houses, and i'm assuming smb was the first one i played. it certainly was once we had our own.

truthfully, this one's a wild guess. one of the college guys nextdoor when i was 10 or 11 had a master system and he let me check out it, but by that point i'd already played some genesis games and i was still pretty fixated on my nes. it could have been wonder boy...?

at some point, my mom got an old amiga 500 from my aunt (who worked in typesetting). california games was among the games for it i played most, but far more than that i liked to fuck around with its text-to-speech program. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILgKv-WGcV0

over at the college kids' house nextdoor!

my cousins had a game boy before i did, and i was very jealous. played a bit of this every time i visited, until i eventually got a scuffed old used one of my own with a copy of link's awakening.

kind of obvious, since it came packed in. alttp would soon follow.

my first dos pc (a gateway 386sx 20mhz) was also a hand-me-down courtesy of my aunt, and she included a huge stack of disks full of shareware. i couldn't tell you how many times i played this game. it was the primary reason i asked for a soundblaster 16 one xmas.

no doubt about this one. that opening video was incredible. the game was... well, it wasn't sonic 2. my friends and i played it on a cdx we'd stolen from media play. heh heh...

probably a fairly typical first saturn game. i actually played it at a best buy kiosk long before i ever bought a saturn used in 1998, but i'll count it.

one of my freshman year high school friends had the kind of mom who bought him goddamn everything he wanted. lucky me: he cared more about his pc and games like ultima 7, so he sold me his ps1 and a stack of games. i was already working at a grocery store at age 14 (fucking hell), so i didn't hesitate.

another obvious one. i had the ps1 and my high school bff (not the aforementioned rich kid) had a 64.

pretty sure i picked up sonic adventure and soulcalibur along with this when i bought a dreamcast in early 2000, but yeah: this was my reason for wanting one in the first place.

for a fair bit after the ps2 launched, i was quite content with my ps1 and dreamcast. i was still playing older stuff, too, as always. this got my attention in magazines, and so i caved. zone of the enders would be another reason, though that was more for the included mgs2 demo...

i don't want to make an entry for, like, every version of windows or whatever, but i played this on an aging but new to me pc from my mom, and it was pretty much my gateway back into pc games after going console-only for a few years.

i got around to the gamecube a couple years late, and i think this was the only game i had for it at first.

it was either this or ff4 advance.

i've never been a big fiend for puzzle games, but i loved rez and this was another mizuguchi game. it also rules.

late to the ps3 because of its launch price, this was the one i could no longer resist. an absolute fucking monument and the beginning of a new era.

i've never had a real psp, but this was probably the first game to make me look into ppsspp. i still need to actually PLAY play it, never mind actually explore the rest of the psp library...

i've never owned a wii, but dolphin was pretty viable by the time this came out...

not gonna lie: the nintendo nostalgia got me hard on this one.

continuing the tradition of buying consoles for fromsoft.

still never owned a wii u or a switch, but i'm gonna go ahead and say yuzu counts for the latter.