ATARI pretty much wiped the floor with COLECO and the Odyssey, so there is really no point in comparing these systems, but let’s talk a little history for a minute.

I got my first ATARI system before I went to Kindergarten – so whenever I got back from daycare, I’d plug in and play for hours on end.  Now, there were three of us so we had to take turns.  I remember that I spent countless hours playing games that had generic sounding one or two word titles: Pacman, Combat, Cannonball, Pitfall, E.T., Defender, Space Invaders, Centipede, Asteroids, Baseball, Skiing, Monaco GP, Berzerk, Krull, Breakout, Dig Dug, Kangaroo, Popeye, Donkey Kong, Mario Brothers, Missile Command, Moon Patrol, Pole Position, Superman, Burger Time, California Games and dozens more.

I’m pretty sure that if I tried to convince my nephews and nieces to play these games, they’d laugh in my face, because these games consisted of a cluster of deformed pixels that invariably, were out to save the world from something.  These games often had no music, and were essentially endurance trials.

See… back then – you couldn’t really beat most of these games, endings came much later, during Nintendo’s era.

The story of how an ancient Japanese card company diversified its product line to include laser tag guns and eventually third party videogames is too long and involved to retell here.  But that’s what Nintendo managed to accomplish.  While I don’t follow Nintendo anymore – or any company for that matter, the NES, Game Boy, SNES and N64 still have special meaning to me.

At any rate – after about a semester’s worth of playing Nintendo at my friend’s father’s video store – in Christmas of 1987, I finally got my NES.  This might be my fondest childhood memory – my favorite present – ever.

Believe it or not, I had a Sears catalog, and I would read it every night, I’d read the game descriptions, the features, and stare at screens, trying to decipher how the games would play out.  My friends and I would talk about what the first couple of games we would buy once we got our consoles.  Some of them would say that they were going for the Sega Master System, but the jury was still out on which system would rule the day.

I must have played Duck Hunt and Super Mario Bros between 8 and 10 hours that day.  Weeks later, without the aid of a GameFAQ, or a Nintendo Power Magazine, I was speed running Super Mario Brothers, worlds 1-1 through 8-4, no warp-zones.  I got so good, that on several occasions I beat the game with the first fire flower.  I eventually quit on Duck Hunt, because I developed an unhealthy hatred towards that god damned brown dog.

I remember playing Contra, doing the Konami code at first, and then eventually never entering it because I’d beat the game with my first spread shot – speed run.  The thing I hated most about Contra was my idiot friends that couldn’t keep up with me on certain levels.

But the game that I played more than any Nintendo game was definitely Double Dragon.  Now granted, it was a poor translation of an awesome arcade game.  But the folks at Tradewest did the best they could given the hardware/software limits of an 8-bit system.  The game didn’t feature 2 player simultaneous fighting, and there were two buttons, not three like in the arcade game.  However there were other different and innovative things that weren’t in the original arcade game, like ground assault – when you dropped Lopar, Williams or Chintai, you were able to punch them while they were on the ground.  The caves were set up like a maze, and if you went through the wrong side – that was your ass.  Stalagtites would rain certain death on you, and there was even a weird elevator level.  Overall, it was a really good rendition of what would later become the formulaic approach to the side scrolling fighting game genre.  It also had somewhat of an RPG element to it, because you had to earn your moves.  I remember spending as much time as possible punching the first Williams and Lopar in the face without killing them just so I could get the elbow move, after that, the game was cake.

I used to play this game every morning – beginning to end, before going to school.

Back then games were about bragging rights, we’d spend our lunch period talking about how we beat a game.  We’d have weeklong discussions about which system was better and cite specific games.  It seemed at the time, that the two consoles were pretty much neck and neck.

The Sega faithful would say Phantasy Star, and we’d reply Final Fantasy.

They’d mention Wonder Boy in Monster Land, and we’d reply Zelda and Zelda II (I know some of you hated that game, but I can play that shit right now, the music was awesome).

They’d say AfterBurner – we’d say Top Gun (I know, I know, Top Gun sucked monkey balls, but we had to keep up appearances).

But clearly, Alex Kidd had nothing on Mario.  And I don’t think that the Sega Master system had anything that could rival Metroid, Castlevania, Life Force or Megaman in sheer awesomeness.

When the dust settled in the first Battle of the Console Wars – at least in my estimation, Nintendo was the clear winner.

8-bit was without a doubt, the golden age of gaming, and all you poor fools that grew up with third and fourth gen systems have no idea what you missed out on.

I consider myself lucky that I was able to watch games evolve from pong to StarCraft 2, it’s been an amazing journey.