NES released in North America in 1985. Toddlers are 1-3 years old. I don’t mean to be pedantic but as someone born in 1979, your statement didn’t match my experience.

I agree though, I already had significant time on my Atari 2600 and on my father’s Intellivision before NES came out.

Why is toddler the age you use to consider whether someone grew up with game a console? I was born in the early 90s and had a Nintendo 64 first (released in 96). Just because I was 6 or 7 when I got it doesn't mean I didn't effectively grow up with one.

Toddler is what was said, so toddler is what I was correcting. I didn’t make the statement in your question, “toddler is the age you use to consider whether someone grew up with a game console.”

I'm in pretty close to the same boat. But one thing I've noticed looking back - the games we played in our childhood and early teens were very different than the games my brother-in-law grew up on, and he's only 8 years younger than me.

For example, I had no problem setting my Atari games down as a child; there's only so many rounds of Pac-Man I could stand even then. Had I been inducted into gaming with Super Mario World and Final Fantasy II instead, well, my parents would have had a much harder time of it.

My first game console: http://pongmuseum.com/collection/heathkit-gd1380.php .

Wasn't even the first in the category of "first-generation of video game consoles". See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_console#First_gener... .

I had one of those too, or something similar at least. Had a few games on it - all variations of Pong

> Somebody born in the US in 1980 certainly wasn't too old to have gaming consoles growing up.

I was born in 1973 and had consoles growing up, the Atari 2600 being the second not long after it came out (don't remember what the first was, except that it didn't use cartridges and had a few built-in games.)

People of about my age and even a little earlier were widely recognized at the time as being the first to have a digital childhood.

The idea that there is a “microgeneration” born later characterized by an analog childhood and digital adulthood is silly.