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Comment by k-mcgrady | Hacker News Reader

The N64 was the first proper games console I owned (I got it as a gift when I was 7). I spent so much time on it and had a lot of fun (I even brought it on holiday with me :). I still love to dig it out of the attic every now and then. Even though I'm not 'a gamer' it holds a lot of happy memories for me. RIP.

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Don't you feel a little sad when you vaguely remember those days? I'm only 26 but my memories about those "golden days" are becoming harder and harder to find.

I got an N64 at the age of 10 when my brother and I got "good grades for an entire year" in primary school. It was my first console (and we didn't have a computer).

I started claiming I wanted to make videogames around the age of 7, so it was almost like a defining moment in my life :) I have a lot of great memories with that thing, and still think the controller design (though not the build) is the best of any console ever.

After we got the N64, we suddenly had many more friends who wanted to come over and play! I evangelized the N64 and eventually there were 4 of us who got one, so we could swap tons of games. (Game acquisition for kids in those days was hard!)

Been a huge Nintendo fan ever since. My N64 is still hooked up to the TV.

> Don't you feel a little sad when you vaguely remember those days? I'm only 26 but my memories about those "golden days" are becoming harder and harder to find.

Creating those kinds of moments for your kids is even better than experiencing them as a kid yourself (for me, anyway).

I hope so, I'm not in that stage of my life yet. Right now, I fear that having children will just completely kill my ability to do anything as a hobby. I'm not sure how justified that is, but it's how I feel.

I'm 27 now and I feel the same way. I still think I won't end up with kids with time running short but I'm an uncle to two boys and a friends daughter calls me uncle. I just hope I have enough money to send them all on adventures. So I really hope what the gp says is true. Though it will be harder to have just the right kids books laying about.

IME it's more a question of spouse than of having children. At first, a child is a black hole for your time. Later they're a lot of fun. Just think of giving them love, more than education.

My dad says the same thing. FWIW, he managed to craft the perfect young childhood for me. I was born in a small, semi-rural college town, moved to a bigger city when I was 10. This means that around the time I started to become aware of some of the sadness of life (and actual sad things began to happen, like my parents divorcing), I was in a different city. This preservation of my earliest, most innocent time has given me kind of a safe-haven. The town has changed (and so have I), but there is so much there that I recognize and have memories of. I try to go back and visit every few years. Although there's always some sense of sadness and loss (friends I no longer know, family bonds broken, realizing that my childhood has truly passed, etc.), those newer memories never butt out the old ones; if anything, they just refresh them.

That's something I'm going to think about when I have kids; how to preserve their earliest happy memories such that they will feel like they can revisit them as an adult to take solace.

My mum won our N64 in a toilet paper competition, which was great because we wouldn't have been able to afford it otherwise. My brother and I spent so much time together playing on it and I don't think I've ever enjoyed games quite as much as I did at that time.

> My mum won our N64 in a toilet paper competition,

What?

His mother won his family's N64 in a promotional prize draw by sending off coupons cut out of toiler paper packaging.

That would make sense. I was hoping for some sort of art competition where you could only use toilet paper and its rolls/packaging for your artwork.

What kind of toilet paper competition?

One where you win an N64! It was some sort of mail-the-coupon-in thing from Andrex in the UK.

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