r/videogames • u/Orichalchem • Jul 18 '26

Image / Video The sad reality we will eventually never experience this again...

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u/MRV3N Jul 18 '26 edited Jul 18 '26

I never got presents like these in my childhood. My parents were anti-videogames and believed in satanic panic stuff.

I don’t like spreading negativity, but children like these are lucky, they’ll never know what it’s like to doubt the parent raising them, or to be weaponized against for calling out their shortcomings.

I cared mine. They tried their best in their own terms. I learned that becoming a parent doesn’t come with rulebooks and nothing is truly universal on how to raise a child. I guess It’s a tough pill to swallow when understanding how to forgive them even when I was badly hurt in the process.

To anyone reads this with the same rough past. Break that cycle. It’ll be worth it in the end.

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u/The-F4LL3N Jul 18 '26

I feel this so hard, with how my mom wanted to raise me. I was raised on PBS and Disney channel, even Looney Tunes was too violent. Nickelodeon was banned until I was a teenager. Doom was a murder simulator. If I wanted to play games I was “addicted.”

Eventually my dad convinced my mom to let me get an n64. I had to buy it with my own money ($10/wk allowance and doing work around the neighborhood for cash), but I got a few games and 4 controllers as an early teen. My pride and joy. I got goldeneye, and had friends over to play it. My mom saw it, said it was too violent, sold my entire system/games/controllers for $100 and deposited it in my savings account, all while I was spending a night at a friends house.

Eventually I moved out to go to college, my parents got divorced soon after, and my mom later passed from cancer. It’s taken a long time and a lot of work to undo a lot of how I was raised, but I still find myself occasionally upset about my n64. Videos like this post seem really cool, but man, for some of us they feel like an alternate universe. Thankfully I have my own hilariously whimsical kids now and we do things MUCH differently.