Christmas morning, 1982. I’m eight years old, sitting on that awful orange shag carpet Mom refused to replace, staring at this wood-paneled beast connected to our massive Zenith console TV. The Atari 2600 had arrived, and with it came Combat – which, let’s be honest, was basically digital Pong with tanks. Dad’s explaining how the joystick works while Mom’s already making comments about me sitting “too close to that television set.” Little did any of us know that chunky plastic box would kickstart a forty-year obsession that’s cost me more money than I care to calculate.
That wasn’t my first console, but it was the first one that felt like mine, you know? And it got me thinking – after decades of collecting, playing, and probably overthinking every system I’ve ever owned, which ones actually defined those formative gaming years? I’m talking about the machines that shaped not just my gaming habits, but honestly, my entire personality. My wife laughs when I say that, but she’s seen me get genuinely emotional watching the Super Mario Bros. overworld theme, so she knows it’s true.
I’ve been obsessing over this ranking for weeks now. Made charts, compared libraries, even dragged out my old issues of Nintendo Power and EGM to refresh my memory about which games came out when. My daughter walked by my desk the other day, saw all the spreadsheets I’d made, and just shook her head. “Dad, you know this isn’t normal, right?” Maybe not, kiddo, but normal people don’t still have working CRT TVs specifically for retro gaming either.
Let me start at the bottom with number eight – the Sega Master System. Now, before any SMS defenders start typing angry comments, hear me out. I never actually owned one of these things. My buddy Mike had one, and I’d play it whenever I was over at his house, but it always felt… I don’t know, off-brand? Like when your mom bought you “Fruity Rings” instead of Fruit Loops. Technically the same thing, arguably even better specs than the NES in some ways, but something about it just didn’t click with me. Phantasy Star was legitimately incredible – I’ll give it that – but one great RPG couldn’t overcome the fact that everything else felt like a poor man’s Nintendo game.
Number seven goes to the Atari 7800, which is probably unfair since I barely experienced it during its actual lifespan. My neighbor Mr. Peterson had one in his basement along with what seemed like every arcade port ever made. Playing Asteroids and Centipede on that thing during those rare times he’d let us kids mess with it was like stepping back in time – except we were stepping back to games that already felt ancient by the mid-80s. Sure, the backward compatibility with 2600 cartridges was neat, but by then I’d tasted the forbidden fruit of Super Mario Bros., and there was no going back to single-screen games that lasted thirty seconds.
The TurboGrafx-16 sits at number six, and I can already hear the outraged comments from the three people who actually owned one when it mattered. I discovered this weird little system at a pawn shop in 1993 – got the console, controller, and about eight HuCards for sixty bucks, which seemed like a fortune to my teenage lawn-mowing budget but turned out to be the deal of the century. Bonk’s Adventure became an instant obsession, and don’t even get me started on Military Madness – that game ate entire weekends. The TurboGrafx had this bizarro-world quality where familiar genres got completely reimagined. It was like finding gaming’s alternate timeline where everything was slightly different but somehow cooler.
Coming in at number five – and this is where I’m gonna lose some of you – is the Nintendo 64. Yeah, I know. “But Samuel, what about GoldenEye? What about Super Mario 64?” Look, those games were revolutionary, no question. Mario 64 literally taught me that 3D worlds were possible, and GoldenEye turned my basement into a four-player battlefield every Friday night for two solid years. But man, that controller. Who designed that thing, someone with three thumbs? And the game droughts… sweet lord, the game droughts. I’d finish Mario 64, then sit there for months waiting for something, anything decent to come out. When you’re fifteen and your allowance can maybe cover one game every two months, those release gaps felt like eternity.
The Sega Genesis takes fourth place, representing the moment I realized brand loyalty was for suckers. I was a Nintendo kid through and through until my older brother brought home a Genesis with Sonic. That blue hedgehog moving at speeds that made Mario look like he was trudging through molasses… it was a revelation. “Genesis does what Nintendon’t” wasn’t just clever marketing – it felt absolutely true when you were playing the uncensored version of Mortal Kombat while your friends were stuck with Nintendo’s kiddie-friendly “sweat” instead of blood. The Genesis had attitude, rebellion, everything that appealed to my angsty teenage sensibilities.
Third place belongs to the Super Nintendo, and honestly, this ranking could’ve gone either way between this and my number two pick. The SNES was Nintendo perfection – every single thing they’d learned from the NES refined to an absolute art form. That controller still feels perfect in my hands thirty years later. Mode 7 graphics that made my brain melt the first time I played F-Zero. Final Fantasy VI (yeah, I know it was called III here, but let’s use the real numbers) remains my favorite game of all time – a sweeping epic that convinced me games could be legitimate art. I called in sick to school for three straight days to finish it, emerging from my room like some kind of RPG hermit, emotionally drained but spiritually fulfilled.
Number two goes to the original PlayStation, the console that grew up with me. I was seventeen when I bought mine with money from my first real job – scooping ice cream at the mall for $4.25 an hour. Took me forever to save up that $299, but walking out of Babbage’s with that gray box under my arm felt like a rite of passage. The PlayStation wasn’t just a technological leap with its CD-ROM format – it represented gaming becoming something for adults, not just kids. Metal Gear Solid felt like playing through a movie, Final Fantasy VII had cutscenes that looked better than some actual movies, and suddenly gaming wasn’t something I had to hide or be embarrassed about.
But number one – and really, did anyone think this would go differently – has to be the original Nintendo Entertainment System. Not because it was technically superior (it wasn’t), not because it had the most comfortable controller (definitely didn’t), and not even because it had the best games (debatable). The NES takes the crown because it was the moment gaming became magic for me. Christmas 1986, age twelve, unwrapping that gray box and experiencing Super Mario Bros. for the first time – that’s a core memory that’s never faded.
The NES was pure possibility in a plastic shell. Every game felt like uncharted territory because, honestly, developers were making up the rules as they went along. You had simple stuff like Excitebike sitting next to complex RPGs like Dragon Warrior. Arcade ports next to completely original concepts. The library was this beautiful mess of experimentation and creativity, unconstrained by focus groups or market research.
What made the NES special wasn’t just the games – it was the entire ecosystem around it. Nintendo Power magazine showing up in the mailbox every month like Christmas. The playground debates about who’d beaten which games. Trading cartridges with friends because nobody could afford everything. The ritual of blowing into cartridges when they wouldn’t work (completely useless, we know now, but it felt like magic then). My original NES still works perfectly, sitting in my game room next to systems that cost twenty times more and can’t match its reliability.
Each of these consoles represents a different phase of my life. The NES was childhood wonder and discovery. The SNES was adolescent sophistication and deeper storytelling. The PlayStation was young adult independence and maturity. Together they track not just gaming’s evolution but my own journey from kid to… well, significantly older kid who happens to pay taxes and have a mortgage.
What’s wild is how certain games become anchored to specific memories. I can’t play Chrono Trigger without remembering the week my parents were going through their rough patch, and I escaped into its time-travel story. Resident Evil reminds me of my first apartment – tiny studio in a sketchy neighborhood, but it was mine, and I celebrated by scaring myself senseless with zombie dogs at 2 AM. These aren’t just games anymore – they’re emotional time machines.
The durability differences between systems tell their own stories too. My NES has survived three moves, a basement flood (thanks to Dad’s quick thinking), and my cousin dropping it down the stairs. Still boots up perfectly. My first PlayStation? Died exactly fourteen months after purchase – two months past warranty, naturally. I was broke, heartbroken, and had to save for weeks to replace it while watching my friends play through Final Fantasy Tactics without me.
Looking back, what strikes me most is how the limitations of these older systems often led to more creativity, not less. Modern games can do literally anything, but sometimes that infinite possibility leads to safe, predictable design. The NES forced developers to be clever, to work within incredible constraints and find innovative solutions. Some of gaming’s most iconic moments came from working around hardware limitations, not despite them.
I still have most of these consoles, displayed in my office like artifacts from a more innocent time. When friends bring their kids over, they’re always fascinated by these ancient, boxy machines. “They look so old,” they say, not meaning to hurt my feelings but managing it anyway. Then I fire up Super Mario Bros. and watch their initial skepticism dissolve as they discover that good game design transcends graphics, processing power, and marketing budgets.
This ranking is completely subjective and probably wrong in a dozen different ways. Your list would look different based on when you were born, what your parents could afford, which friend had which system. That’s what makes gaming nostalgia so personal – we’re not just ranking hardware specs or software libraries, we’re ranking pieces of our own histories.
But if you want to understand who I am as a gamer, just know that somewhere deep in my brain, there’s still a twelve-year-old kid sitting too close to a wood-paneled TV, gripping that rectangular NES controller with sweaty palms, absolutely convinced that this time – this time – he’s gonna save the princess. The graphics have gotten better, the stories more complex, the controllers more ergonomic, but that fundamental sense of wonder and possibility? That’s never changed. And honestly, I hope it never does.
Samuel’s been gaming since the Atari 2600 and still thinks 16-bit was the golden age. Between accounting gigs and parenting teens, he keeps the CRTs humming in his Minneapolis basement, writing about cartridge quirks, console wars, and why pixel art never stopped being beautiful.
