Three Times Video Games Ruined My Family's Christmas

Last year, TheGamer published a lovely series of features in which each editor recalled their favorite holiday gaming memories. Mine was the story of the year I played Batman: Vengeance, a terrible game that I credit with awakening my lifelong interest in game criticism. If that sounds like I was digging deep to find the silver lining in what is actually a bad holiday story, you'd be right. The truth is, my Christmas gaming memories are not as warm and fuzzy as my colleagues’, and it didn't seem right to bum everyone out with holiday tales of hurt feelings, disappointment, and family dysfunction - not while everyone else is gushing about the year they bonded with their grandma over Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3, or whatever.

So here's the stories I didn't want to tell for risk of being the Grinch that stole gamer Christmas last year. These are the three years that video games ruined my family’s Christmas. Or, to be fair, the three times I ruined my family’s Christmas over video games. I don't know if these are funny or just sad, but growing up as an emotional little kid with undiagnosed autism and narcissistic parents, it wasn't always easy to tell the difference.

I'll start with the one that seems the funniest. The story I told last year was about getting a PS2 in 2001. In 2002, the only thing my brother and I wanted for Christmas was a GameCube. Super Smash Bros. Melee came out the previous fall and from that point on you simply couldn't host a party or have a sleepover without a GameCube. We wanted to be popular and the GameCube was our only chance.

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It was nigh on impossible to convince our parents why we needed a GameCube when we already had a PS2; they could not comprehend the difference between two consoles. Just before Christmas, we convinced them to let us rent a GameCube from Blockbuster so we could ‘try it out’ and show them that's what we really wanted. We brought it home and started playing Smash and everything was great, until my responsibility as the older brother to terrorize my younger brother got in the way.

If you want to see a nine-year-old lose his mind, ask him to play Smash, choose Pikachu, and spam Thunder non-stop. No matter how many times he tries to counter it, how many times he changes characters, or how many times he begs you to stop, just keep doing it. The more you laugh the more upset he will get, I promise. Eventually, after a solid 45 minutes of abusing Pikachu down special to humiliate my little brother, he took a swing at me, which was my invitation to pin him to the floor.

My mom decided Smash Bros. was too violent for us, and instead of getting a GameCube that year, we got one of those science project kits so we could learn about teamwork. For the next year I was resigned to playing SOCOM, Hitman 2, and GTA: Vice City, since the GameCube was too mature for us. I never got a GameCube until I bought one off Craigslist in college.

A few years before that, I got Spyro 2: Ripto’s Rage for Christmas. My PlayStation was modded so that my dad could burn games we rented instead of buying them, but that meant it could only play burned games, never real ones. Back then, there was an arms race between Sony and game pirates. New games would come out with better security, and modders would have to update their software to bypass it. This meant periodically taking the PlayStation apart, removing the old chip, and soldering in a new one. You never knew when your PlayStation needed a new update until you put in a burned game and saw that it wouldn't work, and being nine, I relied on my dad to deal with that stuff.

So Christmas morning I received Spyro 2 from Santa, a game I’ve been waiting not-so-patiently to play for two months. Unfortunately I couldn’t just put the disc in my system and start playing because it wouldn’t work until it was copied, and my father has decided not to do that beforehand so as not to break the illusion of Santa Claus. My family might be filthy pirates but Santa is not.

Some time in the afternoon after presents have been opened, breakfast has been served, and family has been visited, he finally gets around to making the copy. I ran the disk to my PlayStation, and sure enough, it didn’t work. Sparx the Dragonfly appeared on screen to scold me for trying to play a stolen game and I collapsed into a heap of tears, realizing immediately that the re-modding process wasn’t going to happen quickly, if it even happened at all.

My dad found me sobbing and lays into me for having a meltdown, before begrudgingly dragging the PlayStation off to service it - a job that takes until the following day as he's fresh out of new solder. Is this a funny story? Probably not. But is it at least relatable? Maybe, if your parents were also involved in an underground PlayStation hacking operation.

This last one continues to confuse me to this day. For Christmas 2004 I desperately wanted a PSP for Christmas. The handheld launched that month, just a few weeks after the Nintendo DS, and it looked like the cool, mature handheld a newly-minted teenager like myself ought to be playing. For Christmas we told our parents that I wanted a PSP and my brother wanted a DS. I had outgrown Pokemon then but he was still into it, so it made sense to us that he would be the Nintendo guy and I would go with Sony.

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In my stocking that year was a handful of plastic cases for DS games shaped like a DS. I decided there must have been a mistake while stuffing the stockings since the DS was for my brother, not me. I offered them to him, but my parents reassured me the cases were mine. “Oh,” I thought. “They didn't make a mistake, they're just idiots.” Then I opened a package from Santa and it was a carrying case for a DS. “Oh,” I thought once more. “Santa’s an idiot too.”

When I eventually unwrapped a Nintendo DS with my name on it, confused, I asked my parents once again if this was supposed to be for my brother. I reminded them that I'm the PSP guy and he's the DS guy. Not only did they confirm that the DS was mine, but they doubled down, telling me that actually, I’d been talking about the DS non-stop all year. They said I told them over and over that the DS was the only thing I wanted for Christmas. Reader, I don't know if you've ever been gaslit into receiving a Nintendo DS, but let me tell you, that’s the kind of thing that sticks with you. To this day I still don't know why they did that.

The most messed up part is that my brother didn't get a DS or a PSP that year. He got a remote controlled plane that we lost on the neighbor’s roof during its first flight. Happy holidays!

Next: Can A Gamer Have A Truly Merry Christmas Anymore?