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Due to a moving miscommunication last year, N “owed” me a wii, which I received last week after some dental work. I love it! It has me thinking about our original Nintendo.

When I was a kid, our parents would not buy us a Nintendo. It was a toy, it was expensive. They told us that we should save our allowance and buy one if we really wanted one. We really wanted one!

My brother and I saved our money for upwards of a year and eventually bought one to share (our parents actually ended up helping out a little, I think they were impressed that we were saving our money and teaming up without fighting).

We also saved money and bought games as we could afford them. It took a while to save up for the ~$30 games with our allowances — much less agreeing on which games to buy — but we did it!

This means that we didn’t have very many games. Instead, we worked out game trades with our neighborhood friends. Everyone had a Nintendo and we would always try to buy games that no one else had yet so we could trade for a couple of weeks. It was really cool that things worked out that way.

I wonder if kids still do this today?