You never forget your first

I grew up in the SNES vs Genesis war and I only knew one person with a Genesis and even they thought the SNES was better.
- Genesis owner in the 90s here. Yes. My dad did not know video games. I said I like Mario. I wanted to play RPGs and Super Mario.
  My dad went to the store, asked what I assume is some 19 year old Sega fanboy which console was the best, and got told to buy the Genesis.
  On a positive note, the Genesis Sonic games were pretty cool, and so was Jurassic Park. So, it's not like Genesis sucked. It's just......MARIO!!!!! I WANT MARIO!!!!
  Eventually I got an SNES, but by then it was 1996. I immediately got Mario Paint, Super Mario Allstars + Super Mario World (in one cart), Legend Of Zelda Link to the Past, and Mario Kart.
  Eventually I'd get Chrono Trigger, Earthbound, Donkey Kong Country, Super Mario RPG, Batman Forever, and some Star Wars game.
  Flea markets in the 90s were the best.
- But... but... Sega does what Nintendon't!
  
  To which my response was "Well... Nintendo doesn't suck." They clearly didn't test that slogan amongst children. 😌
- I had a Sega Megadrive that I loved but still thought SNES was better.
- Growing up I had a Genesis because I wanted to play Sonic 2. I remember 3 of my friends also having a Genesis, only 1 that I remember had a SNES and he was also one of the 3 with a Genesis. There were 2 that I remember stuck with NES, 1 played on his family's PC (ooh fancy), and 1 I don't think had any video game systems. The first real Nintendo fanboy I met was my college roommate, but that wasn't until the mid-00's.
  SNES probably was better, but I had more exposure to the Genesis so that's what I wanted.
- Mega Drive was awesome
- I had SNES and pretty much all of the best games, but my friend had Sega Channel and I COVETED IT.

I kid, I kid... actually I am obsessed with konsole
- Konsole sounds like the name KDE would use for a home gaming device, or their terminal emulator :3
  
  https://konsole.kde.org/

Dreamcast was the best.

Does the Offspring come to mind when thinking of the Dreamcast? I can't get it out of my head now.
- Crazy Taxi had them on the soundtrack and it was a Dreamcast game... 🤔
  
  Ya ya ya ya yaaaaa! Day after day..
  
  Fuuuuck I rented that game so much back then. If it wasn’t available every other weekend at my local video store it was 100% my fault.
  
  Yep and a damn fine game at that! Atleast that I can remember.
- https://youtu.be/MNHoWdid7ag
- Does the Offspring come to mind when thinking of the Dreamcast?
  🎵 Ya ya ya ya ya 🎵
- I need to know more about this.
  
  The song "All I Want" was prominently featured in the game Crazy Taxi, I believe.

I can't believe I threw away my Dreamcast. I'm such an idiot.
- There's a few on ebay for like a hundred bucks, or there's always emulation
  https://www.emulator-zone.com/doc.php/dreamcast/flycast.html
  
  I ran NES emulators on my Dreamcast, lol.
  Gonna have to dig it out over the weekend...
- Right there with ya, except I gave away all my consoles. Original 2600, 5200, Intellivision, NES, SNES, Game gear... on up through my two 360s. There were since esoteric ones in there, and some real stinkers: CD-i, 3DO leap to mind.

Never forget my first but slightly going in reverse….. those SNES games just hit hard.
- never owned a snes, had a gamecube before I first emulated snes games. Chrono Trigger fucks.
  
  So good, maybe too good. Soundtrack just slaps, always triggering a moment playing the game.

Sega Mega Drive for me. We had knock off NES consoles in my country with 100 in 1 cartridges but we just called those "TV games". Nintendo never bothered with any non first world country back then, so pirates picked up the slack. I don't think I even knew of the 'Nintendo' brand when I was a little kid until I started using the internet and collecting magazines.
But Sega wasn't quite as stiff upper lip and exclusive as Nintendo and had no problem with lowering themselves and selling their goods to us plebs in the 3rd world. So Sega was the premium brand here and "TV games" were just cheap shit in comparison in my eyes.
We had a knock off NES when I was a little kid (called a Pegasus) but my first actual legit name brand console was the Sega Mega Drive.
Wish I still had it. When I was about 13, I went through a really dumb phase for about 1 month total where I decided I was too grown up for this stuff and I sold my Mega Drive and comics for enough money to buy one CD, probably of a band that I don't even listen to anymore. Regret it to this day.
- Brazil wasn't much different in regards to being ignored by Nintendo and Sega picking up the slack and money, first with their Master System then with the Mega Drive.
  The thing with the infinite amounts of famiclones was that the original Famicom was fully made of off-the-shelf parts, that is, if you know how to solder stuff, you can make one by yourself if you buy the components. When Nintendo started considering the Brazilian market, they realized they were too late: our local famiclones were better machines, with some of them having slots for both western and Japanese cartridges.

I'm obsessed with the OG xbox and 360, oh how the mighty have fallen.
- The 360 was so good
  
  Yeah if you never got the red ring of death it was the best console.
  Its DRM was more flexible than we have ever or will ever see on a console again.
  The licensing worked similar to xbox one but you could transfer all licenses at once instead of just when you downloaded a game.
  You could install any disc or digital game to internal or external drives and could transfer it between any pc/console. The discs then functioned as physical licenses to play disc-based games.
  The avatar system was the gaming metaverse we all wanted and it got abandoned before it could reach its full potential.
  Avatar awards as skins you could show off in multiple games!? Amazing.
  indie devs could take advantage of the avatar system to enhance their games
  The library was the peak that xbox ever had to offer. Uniqueness and passion still showed through in AAA games of this era, and 360 had the majority of quality AAA games. PS3 still managed, but nostalgia for the 360 days is what is still keeping the xbox brand alive today.
  The online multiplayer in games of this era still celebrated and enabled community/random encounters with voice chat. This doesnt happen in modern games, nobody is in the game chat anymore. I am not a fan of paid multiplayer so i dont pay anymore, but back in the day, it was worth it for the shenanigans and connections we made.
  
  red ring of death

Honestly got to hand it to my PS4. I've had it since the early days of dating my wife, and she gifted it to me when I was a broke uni student. It's still serving Armored Core VI, indie games, and movie nights to this day. I've pulled it open several times over the years to dust it out and it's got an external fan add-on to help with cooling. I won't know what to do with myself when it gives out someday.
- Base PS4 or Pro? If the former, a Pro could be a pretty good upgrade. Also not super expensive compared to the base model.
  A PS5 is, of course, also nice if your budget allows it. Been happy with mine since its release. Feels like a real step-up compared to the entire PS4 line, even if you're only interested in PS4 games.
  Also, check the firmware of your PS4 in case you haven't updated it recently. You could potentially jailbreak it and unlock heaps more potential. Emulation and stuff, for example.
  
  It's a base model. I'm going to keep using it as long as I can as-is, I don't really have the spare mental bandwidth to tinker (nor the budget to rectify any mistakes), but it's cool that they can be jailbroken.
  Whenever I'm finally done with it, it'll probably be time for a Steam Deck (probably some time after the release of the SD2, knowing me).

My first console was an Atari 2600. Well that was my family’s first.
My own fist was the original NES. Saved up my paper route money to buy it.
- My first was the 5200 and my favorite game was Joust. Killing the pterodactyl was the highlight too.
  
  The 5200's was the best home version of Joust.
- The real question, did you play paperboy on it?
  
  Oddly enough, I did not.

Where’s my ps2 heads at
- Yes!! Still never been beat.

Phillips CDi? Oh no!

Intellivision 👾

PC engine, even though I never even saw one in person lol.
- To me, that'll be the Amiga 500 computer then. I don't think it ever existed in Brazilian soil, but damn, talk about the best consumer hardware you could get in the mid-late 80s. Like many good things, (mis)management fucked it up. Ars Technica has a series of articles that explain its history very well
  
  Atari and Amiga were sooooo good at the time. It’s a shame Microsoft and Apple won in the end. These machines were so much better technologically, power, and usability wise.
  I plaid lots of LucasArts adventures on these

Oh good. I'm now too old to be nostalgic.
But what 32 year old has ever seen a caleco vision?

PolyStation. I'm from center Europe, so Famiclones were a big thing in the 90s.
- I hated those things because of how easy it was to scam unaware parents. "Your kid asked for a playstation? Oh, sure, it's this polystation, they must've said the name wrong, it's this one, for sure!"

It was not my first (this would have been the Atari 2600), but the console that still has a very special place in my heart is the Atari Jaguar

Gameboy gang rise!!
- In all it's shades of green 💚

Atari 400 ✋
- I had an 800. Had the cassette tape media drive and some game for it, but could never get it working.
  Also had that awful ET game.
  I recall writing a screensaver in basic and letting it run overnight.
  
  Hey, do you want like 400,000 more copies of E.T? They're just sitting there. In some landfill.
  
  The 800 was the better machine but god damn the 400 is so sexy 🥵
  The idea of writing anything on its awful membrane keyboard is inconceivable though 😅

Aw, this is what I get for not paying attention to what instance I was posting in.

Ouya!
No? Okay, Game Boy!
- The revolution will be televised!
  I still play towerfall, and occasionally the amazing frog?

For me, it was always consoles I never actually got. Dreamcast for a while (VMUs were so fucking cool), then the GP32.

I guess mine's a PC from the 90s or 00s
Maybe PS1 at a push given the family computer didn't really do 3D until we got a 3D accelerator a few years later

Ngage, what is this even?

ps2?

Ha it's me. Wow.

Anyone got the original comic?
- Here ya go
- What war you will be obsessed with
- the original is about wars i think

nes galaga at my dads house <3

Granted I was pretty young, but I friggin loved the ColecoVision. It had a respectable game library and Zaxxon in particular was the stuff. I remember my mom playing Ladybug (Pacman clone) frequently.
Welp. Guess I'm spending the rest of my evening looking for an emulator.

Atari Jaguar. No one I knew had one and the only place to play one was a single game store in a mall that you had to pay to play. I paid twice to play and was in love.

I really liked my GBA

You'll never guess mine.
- N60?
  
  ye
- That is just inviting people to start throwing out names of lesser-known systems. Can we narrow it down to Western (including South America), Eastern European, or South-east Asian before we start?

PSP was my first ('98 here), the 360 my second, a 3DS my third. I probably spent thousand of hours on my PSP, so I'd go for PSP probably. Jailbroke my childhood PSP a year ago or so and enjoyed playing a bunch of games I couldn't get. Also jailbroke my 3DS and gave it to my partner as a birthday gift so she could play all the Layton games which she grew up with.
A couple years ago, my obsession was probably the GBA, though. Growing up, we couldn't really afford any consoles, so my only experiences with Pokemon and stuff was via emulators on my PC. Had a period of them where I'd buy old GBAs, shell-swap them, restore old games and their batteries and fun stuff like that. Haven't touched the couple I have for some time now, sadly

I was obsessed with the N64 when I was a kid, but I never owned one. Honorable mention to the GBC, but I did get one shortly after the GBA came out.

GBA SP here.

This is what happens when parents don't vaccine. When you are very young, you can get vaccinated with computer gaming. You can absolutely still enjoy consoles and the great games that come out on them, but you have a certain protection against obsessing over a specific console.
For me it was Commodore 64 I was vaccinated with. This also let me enjoy a future of DOS gaming right along side NES and Genesis gaming.
- In some places, the ZX Spectrum vs Commodore 64 war was epic. Likewise for Amiga vs Atari ST. Magazines for one fanbase would regularly mock the other. And I don't know what the TRS-80 was going up against, but I've seen it called the "Trash-80" more than a couple of times.
  What can help proof someone against this excessive dedication to one platform isn't which platform you start them on; it's starting them on multiple platforms as soon as possible. Getting them interested in the individual games rather than the fan club nonsense.
  As human beings we naturally oversimplify things. So when our entire experience has been A, and the people around us frame the world as a choice between A and B, we're naturally going to defend A with our life. That's because without really thinking about it, we've bought into the idea that A is either right or wrong, with no middle-ground, and we hate to be wrong.

Never had a console growing up. PC all the way. Started with a ZX Spectrum clone, then a 286, then a Pentium 100, and so on. I got my first consoles as an adult, first the Xbox One, which I never really played anything other than Just Dance on, then a Switch, which I couldn't really get into either and ended up playing more on Ryujinx than on the actual switch. Bought an old 3DS at one point and its also just sitting in a drawer. Guess I'm too much of a PC gamer to get into consoles.

does PC count? because i never gave a fuck about consoles beyond "oh shit the 3ds can do 3d? that's the coolest thing i have ever seen"

Loved the Wii but it definitely wasn't my first (NES) but have fond memories with all the consoles my friends owned when I was.growing up