Although I’ve played video games on a regular basis for literal decades now, my earliest days with the medium were quite casual, as I was restricted to playing whatever was available at friends’ houses or what I could find in the arcades. I knew Mario and Sonic and the Mortal Kombat crew, along with staples like Street Fighter, Pac-Man, Space Invaders and the like.
But the only video games I owned myself in my early years were the cheap plastic devices sold by Tiger Electronics and similar retailers. I played a lot of X-Men on that cheap, black-and-white piece of garbage, but it was a sub-optimal experience for someone living in the midst of the Super Nintendo generation.
So, with the Christmas of my 11th year fast approaching, I began my lobbying campaign on my hapless parents, and I put ol’ Ralphie from A Christmas Story to shame in my zeal for a console of my own. A Red Ryder BB gun was nothing compared to Japanese game design, I tell you what.
Quickly convinced a push for an SNES or Genesis would avail me nothing, I switched my game lust to Nintendo’s trusty Game Boy and was thrilled when my constant badgering seemed to gain results. Already I could dream of guiding Mario or Kirby through glorious adventures on that tiny green screen, and Christmas seemed farther away than ever.
Christmas arrived eventually, though, and as Christmas Eve drew to a close, I already had a plan.
Last year, as a 10-year-old, I had awakened far too early on Christmas morning to discover my parents had already placed the presents out and withdrawn for some shut-eye before we yelled them awake for the holiday bacchanalia. The clock read 4 am, and I silently crept amongst the gifts, unprotected from my greedy eyes by any tinsel or wrapping paper, and soaked in the joy of acquiring my very own Batmobile and other action figures from the Ninja Turtles and superhero lines I loved so much.
Surfeited with holiday avarice, I went back to bed and dreamt of opening those joyous gifts with the morn.
Primed for this Christmas, I once awoke before dawn to make another early reconnaissance of the holiday bounty, only to discover I had been outwitted. At some point I must have let slip my secret holiday spycraft of the previous year, because my parents had done the unthinkable: They had wrapped my presents — only my presents. I could easily see whatever useless knickknacks my younger siblings had acquired. But my gifts were covered in pristine wrapping paper, impervious to my seeking eyes. Reduced to looking at the size and weight of packages, I went to bed defeated, though with the hope of having identified the likely box containing my Game Boy.
There was another, larger box under the tree with my name and wrapping paper on it, which roused my interest, but for all I knew it was a shoebox or some other dreary, practical gift, so I didn’t give it another thought.
One frustrated sleep cycle later, I was up again, this time surrounded by my family, all of whom were chuckling a bit at my chagrin at being thwarted in scouting out the gifts hours earlier.
It was mighty satisfying to tear away the offending paper now, though, and expose toys and books and other holiday treats. And there, just as I’d imagined, was my Game Boy, Tetris packed away inside promising hours and hours of contented puzzling to come.
But there was still that last box, containing I knew not what, and I tore away the paper to discover my parents had one more surprise up their sleeves.
For there, despite my seemingly blasted hopes, was a brand-new SNES.
My shout of shocked rapture probably still echoes somewhere in the corner of that old house.
They had bought me the budget bundle, which only came with one controller, but I hardly cared. More surprising was that this secondary bundle came not with Super Mario World but a different game: The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past.
I had little experience with Zelda before then, but as I impatiently badgered my father to hook up the SNES to the cable jack and get the little gray box set up, I was eager to try out my new title. And while it would take me a while to wrest the controller away from my father, who decided to try out this video game thing himself, I was soon happily traveling into the depths of Hyrule’s darkest dungeons and forging my first memories of a world that would soon dominate my gaming life. I would eventually gain another controller and even a copy of Super Mario World, but this Christmas miracle had already ensured my fortunes would stay with Zelda, always.
I have received many other great Christmas gifts in the years since, including other video game consoles, but no other Christmas has ever been as magical as the holiday when I was 11 years old, diabolical wrapping paper and all. And the Zelda surprise was a big part of that.
