My dad works/worked for IBM and my mom was a nurse who had a secret dream of becoming a spanish/english translator. As a result, I was left alone a lot as a kid.
I also had IBM thinkpads, big huge medical books, and some fucked up english/spanish speaking mannerisms. I don't even look hispanic.
We had a huge library, and in there were some thickass books. Medical books, where I learned to skew a lot of health problems for cool RP characters (lol all my rpcs are dying somehow) and we also had a full set of encyclopedias, which I would also thumb through like Asmo did, learning about weird stuff. It wasn't encyclopedia britanica, though. It was something else...
We had 12 channels, and our choices were nature shows or news. Coincidentally, I had no interest in the real world so I knew all about pretty much every animal nobody else had heard of. Also saturday cartoons. And Street Sharks. And the original Ninja Turtles. And that CG show they based off Starship Troopers that I conveniently forgot the name of. MIB the cartoon, Godzilla the cartoon, Beast Wars, Dragonball Z (when we finally got cable I was like 14 or 15 already). Sonic Underground. Big Comfy Couch.
I also had a 90% completed version of Natural Geographic wildlife species information cards. Basically it was this flip-through binder and every fold-out card had a species with kind of a wikipedia page on it. You got a set of 6 or so random ones in the mail every month and eventually you'd have 4 full hugeass binders with what essentially was every single existing species of animal ever (that had been discovered up to that point). Now that I think of it, maybe it wasn't natural geographic. But it was damn cool and I wish I knew the actual name of it. I wonder if I still have them in storage somewhere. They were really helpful/informative.
No one in my family got a cell phone until at least 2001. But, my mom did have a beeper. Not a pager. A beeper. Hurhurr.
We had NES and SNES. I remember playing that olympics game and looking totally retarded trying to run on the track mat for the running game. Duck hunt. Mario Bros. Then Doom came out. I played my first mortal combat sometime around the same time I played Doom on the computer. And the very first Grand Theft Auto on the computer when the people looked like sticks and you could jump over the hood of a car. Yeah, the new fangled GTAs kind of suck with their realism now.
I got an N64 and a PS1, but my next door neighbor had every sega console ever. Then when Dreamcast went down, he got every nintendo console ever.
Light Brites.
