I stole my own Christmas present in 1991
This is something that I have grown to seriously regret as I get older and I have actually spoken to my parents about it and we laugh, but that doesn't eliminate the guilt that I feel about it having happened.
In 1991 the video game world was a pretty exciting place. The 16-bit era was upon us and the difference in power between the NES and Sega Master System as opposed to the Sega Genesis and TurboGrafx-16 was immense. At that point in my life we didn't have internet (I don't think almost anyone did) so we ended up finding out about advancements in video games by magazines, word of mouth, or just be seeing the odd demo in a Toys R'Us or something like that.
While there was some level of secrecy to our Christmas presents our parents did ask us kids for some help as far as what to get us, and for me the answer was pretty easy. I wanted a Sega Genesis and a game called Insector X as an additional cartridge.
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I have no idea how I found out about this game, it was probably a magazine of some sort. I had never actually played it. To me it looked really cool because while side-scrolling shooters were all the rage, this one was a bit different in that you were some sort of cyber-bug and fighting mostly other bugs. It was cool.
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This isn't a write-up about that game though because honestly, it was kind of a carbon copy of a lot of other games like it with powerups, a number of levels with bosses and the way to excel at it was to memorize the patterns of the enemies and figure out the weak point of the various huge bugs that would come your way.
no, the story here is how I infiltrated the attic, found the gift, slyly opened it, and then took the game to a friend's house weeks before actual Christmas. My plan was to slyly sneak it back into the box before Christmas day or if I couldn't pull that off, I would just keep the cartridge somewhere nearby and replace it after opening the gift on Christmas morning because nobody in my family would notice that the cartridge wasn't actually in the case that it came in.
This ended up kind of ruining my own Christmas though and looking back I'm happy that it did, you little shit. By the time the morning came I had already defeated the game at my friend's house and didn't really want to play it. I was also in danger of being "too good at it" but that turned out to be a non-issue because my other family members were either completely disinterested in video games or they were too young to have any real abilities. So my prowess would probably go unnoticed.
What was noticed was that I didn't have much enthusiasm for playing it and this just kind of makes me feel even worse because my mom asked "do you not like it?" and she was genuinely concerned and said that maybe we can exchange it at the store in a few days once they open again. Bless her innocent and wonderful heart. Even though I was an asshole teenager at the time, this made me feel bad and hurt inside. So to put my mom at ease I had to pretend to be enthusiastic about this game for the next couple of hours and pretend to be surprised by what was coming up next in the game even though I had already defeated it several times at my buddy's house down the steet.
Shame on me!
I very well could have completed the game that morning but had to pretend that I couldn't manage it and tried to be a good brother by instead encouraging my younger siblings to play it.
I have felt bad about that day for more than 30 years.