This week, the Heave staff was asked:

What’s the best holiday present you got as a kid?

Adam Cowden

An N64, obviously!

Amy Dittmeier

My Talkboy FX Plus.

Johnny Coconate

A cage made out of fudge that I had to eat my way out of.

Anthony Hoffman

All my best gifts were video games, which explains a lot about me. I still remember Xmas ’91 and finding a Super Nintendo under in the tree. And at $200 bucks ($332, adjusted for inflation), it wasn’t  cheap, especially for a single mom raising three kids. It came with Super Mario World, which my brother, sister and I proceeded to play to crap out of, riding Yoshi’s dopey ass for hours on end. Thanks, mom.

Meghan Bongartz

One year I got a handheld Snow White game that I absolutely played the fuck out of, and which I think was probably the first electronic game I owned. It was even better than the Super Nintendo that I received around the same time because I didn’t have to share it with my brother. In retrospect, it was definitely too hard for me, but I’m a completionist, so that didn’t stop me from determinedly playing the same two levels over and over and over again. And now I’m going to spend the rest of the day wondering whatever happened to that game.

Dominick Suzanne-Mayer

When I was a kid, my grandfather loved to complicate the process of getting presents. For him, since I was about to be handed stuff I wanted and was nowhere near old enough to get on my own, I had to work for it. This ranged from scavenger hunts that allowed me to find a copy of the Batman & Robin soundtrack under my kitchen sink, to a giant box wrapped in layer after layer of duct tape. My favorite was when my copy of WWE No Mercy, by far my all-time most played video game, was put in a box that’d fit a ’90s tube television, along with a battery-powered severed hand that crawled around in the box. To this day, I’ve never screamed at a higher octave.