Video gaming is something that can strike like lightning and deal life-changing effects to a person of any age. Perhaps the first time you laid your hands on a controller was a Pac-Man cabinet down on the boardwalk in Santa Barbara back in '68. Maybe your induction was the clicky pad of the Colecovision as you jumped around Pitfall! You might even be brand new to the scene even if you're not new to this Earth, and you only really started after the buzz of something called "Grand Theft Auto" convinced you to plunk down a few hundred dollars and see what the kids you teach couldn't shut up about. Hell, my grandfather didn't even try a single game until his fifth grandchild was born, and now he can't go more than a day without emailing me photos of what he's building in Minecraft.

We all romanticize and base our future of video gaming on what our foundation was. The histories that shape our current interest are varied, but it's sometimes interesting to find similar paths based on birthdate, region or even country. If you were born in the 80s in Japan, your first Nintendo machine may have used floppy disks instead of cartridges. The difference of being born in 92 or 93 determined if your first Sega Genesis played carts, disks or a combination of both with a sweet boom box as well. When you hear the word "Panasonic," do you think of just TVs and Blu-Ray players, or do you remember the 3DO and all the amazing arcade ports it housed? It's all a matter of timing and perspective, and the results are really quite different. In fact, let's check out the Playism staff's own beginnings of consoles:

Meghan - Gameboy Color, which I played in secrecy.

Mike - NES, original Super Mario bros all the way.

Bryan - Nintendo Entertainment System, because my parents sold the Atari 2600 two weeks before I was born.

Nayan - Very very first was a Game and Watch, which I lost in a taxi despite a two hour chase in Singapore.

Dan - Probably Atari 2600. There was already an Intellivision and Colecovision waiting for me when I was born.

Bart - I think it was a Pegasus, then an Amiga.

Burak - It was a Commodore 64, I had that when I was six, wonder where it is now...OMG I FEEL OLD.

There's a good deal of retro nostalgia here at the helm of Playism, but that's what makes us good at our jobs. We can remember and enjoy what it was like to play the games when we were young, and it's a fond memory (even if somewhat heartbreaking, poor Nayan). If the games that we bring to you can evoke even a small amount of the joy that your first system ever did, then we are doing it right.