<Games />
Growing up, my parents never let my brother and I buy a video game systems. I think they were worried we would spend too much time playing them. They were probably right, but we will never know. The unfortunate part about not owning a video game system was that we had to mooch off of our friends. All we would ever want to do with them was play video games. The other downside was that our friends were able to save their games and were always more skilled than we were. I remember on rare occasions being lucky enough to be able to rent a video game system for the weekend. Whenever that happened, we played from dusk till dawn. The worst part is that we could never save our progress because video game systems did not have memory cards or hard drives at that time.
Eventually in the early 90's our parents broke down and let us buy a Nintendo. However, shortly after that the Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo were released. Since we were poor and did not know how to save our money, we sold all our Nintendo equipment at the local Funcoland to buy a Sega Genesis. That was the video game system that most of our friends had. We figured we could share games with them. As it turns out, we liked more of the proprietary games on the Super Nintendo and ended up selling the Sega Genesis and buying that.
Wouldn't you know it, that year the Nintendo Game Boy was released. As you might have guessed we sold our Super Nintendo to buy a Nintendo Game Boy for each of us. Those long road trips to Grandma's house were a lot more fun when we had those! I played Tetris till my fingers hurt!
Not long after that the, CD-ROM was invented which boosted sales in the video game market. Many video game systems started utilizing the technology. For awhile I owned a Panasonic 3DO (the first CD-ROM based video game system), but quickly sold it to buy a Sony Playstation. I actually held onto the Sony Playstation for the better part of my college years but eventually sold it to my brother who still owns it.
Currently, I own a an Xbox 360 which is a pretty amazing gaming machine.
My brother and I formed a very bad habit of buying the latest equipment in gaming and then selling it for nothing to buy the next big thing. It was a terrible habit, but it taught us a good life lesson that we are now able to control. We no longer buy things and turn around and sell them right away. We make our financial decisions with long-term goals in mind.
