Sega Genesis and Power Rangers: The Movie The Game

The year was 1997. I was six years old. My brother was barely four. We had, before this point, played video games over at friends’ houses and even at my grandmother’s home. She had a whole collection of Atari 2600 carts and the original console complete with multiple controllers. It was awesome. But we didn’t have a console of our own.

That was going to change. For Christmas that year, my parents decided to finally buy us some goddamn video games. Thing is, video games were (as they are today) very expensive. So instead of buying us the PlayStation 1 or N64—which was out and flourishing at that point in time—my parents took the advice of a dude working at some random Walmart or Kmart and bought the older Genesis. It was cheaper and had a ton of games and if we young, dumb kids liked it, in a few years they could buy a better console.

The Christmas morning, I don’t remember much. But I do remember my brother and me opening the last gift and discovering that we now owned a Sega Genesis. I didn’t really know what that meant, but then it was hooked up to our TV in the living room, and discovered that it played video games. For the rest of the morning and afternoon, my brother and I played it. We had one game: the licensed beat ‘em up, Mighty Morphin Power Rangers The Game. Eventually, Iwould go on to beat that game and it would be the very first game I ever finished. But that Christmas morning we didn’t beat it. I’m not sure we even got past the second level. Didn’t matter. We had so much fun. We finally had our own video game console.Over the next few years, I played the shit out of that Genesis. And it started me down a path that eventually led me to here, a dude writing about video games online for a living. Not bad for a cheap console bought at Walmart.

Zack Zwiezen, Staff Writer