It was the Christmas of 1992. Mr Blobby was the funniest thing on television (according to your parents), and Whitney Houston had been tricked into singing a love song about everyone's favourite sentient cardigan, Kevin Costner (I feel like I'm having a war flashback now).
And me? Well, I was having a great time despite all of this, actually. Because Santa had done me a massive solid.
Now, two things. Firstly, Santa hadn't done a toilet in my lounge. That's not what I mean at all.
Secondly, I was 14 years old in 1992, so I shouldn't have been asking my bewildered and frightened parents (Mr Blobby-loving fools) to send a rather bullish letter to the North Pole requesting — demanding — a Super Nintendo Entertainment System with a copy of Street Fighter 2.
With the arrival of this tour-de-force into to the sitting room of my Dickensian home on 25th December 1992, I, for the first time ever, was experiencing graphical and gameplay parity (after a lot of trying on my beloved Commodore 64) with the local arcade version of The World Warrior, where I had previously been spending all the money I could steal from my Mr Blobby-loving dad to feed my addiction to Eddie Honda's big shiny chest. (Don't worry, I never paid him back.)
This was my first Nintendo console! My first console of any kind that was mine, in fact, and as a result of this, and because it was the first game that really made me feel as though the home experience could indeed match the flashy side of the arcade one, Street Fighter 2 has — and always will have — a very special place in my heart. It was a bonus, really, that it was also phenomenal to play as well as to sit and stare at.
In a way that it's hard to convey today, when we're drowning in deep and meaningful gaming experiences, and when gamers have grown up with home consoles that give them the best of everything at their fingertips, Street Fighter 2 awakened me to the possibility that, for me, gaming might not, like a puppy for example, be just for Christmas.
And this is the serious bit, the 'science bit' if you will. Because I grew up in a time and place that happened entirely before the internet (and possibly before Jesus, but that's another Christmas story for another Christmastime), it was very easy to feel cut off and left behind in matters technologic. Such was life in rural '80s and '90s Ireland; lots of cow s**t, not so much of the latest high street cool s**t.
Street Fighter 2, though, with those fancy arcade-perfect graphics and noises and music, well, that was what everyone who knew anything was playing and talking about that particular year's end (in my young mind), and I was now playing and talking about it, too. Mostly to myself, but you can't win 'em all.
It seems like nothing, and it is! But that little glimmer of feeling as though I was involved was, for a wee guy who was yet to meet any other real-world gaming pals, and for someone who lived quite remotely, it was a big deal to be riding the latest wave of excitement. You couldn't just hit someone up in their DMs back then, y'know. Connections hit different.
And so, because I'm a legit saddo (as you'll now know and understand), every Christmas to this very day I still boot up the old Street Fighter 2 on my SNES (not my OG machine, unfortunately) and dig into one or two runs of its fabulous arcade mode. It's a game that's never aged in my mind; it looks as good as it ever did in its detailed pugilists, atmospheric environments and delightful little background animations. And complaints about the awful frame rate will get you banned from my Xmas party punch bowl, I'm afraid.
It ties a bow on my festive period, it drowns me in just right volume of intoxicating nostalgia, and it reminds me of more innocent times. All of that guff.
But it also marks a point where I remember vividly having shifted from loving games and playing games for what they were to wanting to keep them in my life as a thing that helped me connect and feel connected. And I guess that's what I'm still doing to this day.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to show my sons how red and trembly my face goes when I can't reliably pull off Vega's wall dive. Merry Christmas and that.
Do you have a game that you play out of a sense of tradition or for some other reason every Christmas? Let us know.