To celebrate today’s 25th birthday of the Nintendo Entertainment system, we at Spectacle Rock would like to share some of our earliest memories of the system that, without argument, had a huge effect on all of our lives.

Jeff Feeser:

1985.  I was six years old.  The year was a formative year for me, not so much in terms of physical growth, although that was surely happening; and not in terms of mental growth, although that was surely happening as well.  1985 was the first year in that it was one of the first years I can really remember starting to pay attention to pop culture.  My parents had finally decided I was old enough to start watching movies, and my father, bless his heart, decided that he would show me Star Wars on VHS, and when it came out later that year, allow me to see Back to the Future.  I had already been watching He-Man for years, and the Intellivision was a mainstay in our living room.  However, the games for that venerable system had started to become long in the tooth, and even at the age of 6 I was starting to feel like some of the games that were new on the shelf were just rehashes of games I had already played.  My videogame curmudgeon-dom had already begun, and I hadn’t even hit puberty yet.  At that young age, it didn’t even occur to me that new systems were on the horizon.

That was when my cousin brought over his new “Nintendo Entertainment System”.

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My parents were nice enough to let me own video game systems when I was younger, but the trick of the matter was that if I wanted a new game, I pretty much had to buy it myself.  Outside of very rarely getting a game at Christmas or my birthday, any time I wanted a game I had to save up birthday money, chore money, allowance, anything really, and choose carefully what I wanted to purchase.  This, as you might imagine, made me pretty choosy when it came to selecting games; if it was going to take weeks and weeks of saving to be able to afford one, I wanted to make damn sure I was going to get my money’s worth out of it.

For some titles, the choice was easy; A Link to the Past or Final Fantasy III were no-brainers, and my spending was richly rewarded.  Others, like Zombies At My Neighbors or Uniracers, were less familiar, but ultimately proved to be wise decisions.

And then there was Lagoon.

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