The gift of gaming: the joys of getting a console for Christmas

We all remember that one Christmas present we got as a kid. The one we'd begged our parents for all year, the one we'd looked up 100 times in the Argos catalogue or on Amazon, depending on our age … For many of us, that present was a games machine. Whether it was a ZX Spectrum or a PlayStation 2, the process of unpacking these technological marvels, getting our mums and dads to set them up, then finally playing with the whole family, was magical. We asked game developers, gaming journalists and Guardian readers to share their favourite memories of receiving a games console at Christmas. "I think it was 1997. We had a normal Christmas, woke up, opened presents, had dinner as always – super nice. Anyway, it got to around bedtime and me and my little brother went to brush our teeth and get ready. All of a sudden, my dad calls to us: 'Boys!? What's this?' He's shouting from our bedroom. Confused, me and my brother head in and Dad's like, 'How did you miss this? Under the bed!' We look and there's a big present all wrapped up. We were so confused, but ecstatic. We opened it and … it was a Nintendo N64. We stayed up an extra hour setting it up and playing Super Mario 64 for the first time with Dad on the bedroom floor. "My mam told me two weeks before Christmas that the shops had sold out of Sega Saturns.