I’ll never forget the Christmas I got my NES. And now I really want this mini NES.

One Christmas day remains with me, far more lucid than any other from childhood. It’s the one when I got a NES. 1987.

That was the year the NES finally launched in the UK, a few years after it came out in Japan. But I didn’t know about all that then. It’s not like I could easily look up that info on the internet.

This tiny NES is the Nintendo Classic Mini that the Japanese company revealed today. It goes on sale in time for Christmas. Photo credit: Nintendo.

All I recall is my first nostrilful of new gadget smell as I set the NES up on a small TV. It was black-and-white. The rest of the day was a whirl, some of which I recall vividly, of progressing through Mario with encouragement from my brothers, and then sometimes swapping out one of the controllers for the orange gun for some slaughter in Duck Hunt.

Before that, my experience of gaming was a boring and laborious one, loading up games on cassette tapes on my brother’s Spectrum ZX, tapping in some arcane code, and then pressing play on the little Walkman linked to the Spectrum. Sometimes you started the tape in the wrong place and loaded the wrong game – ya know, a tape jammed full of pirated games, as you do – or sometimes the batteries ran out and that meant no more gaming until you could beg or borrow more batteries from somewhere else. Or put them on the radiator to get more juice out of them.

This tiny NES is dubbed the Nintendo Classic Mini.

Sometimes, horror of all horrors, the Walkman devoured the tape with a sickening shriek and a ttrgrgggrtrhrhshs. Like that time I saw a hamster eat its baby.

What I’m saying is that the Spectrum was shit.

The NES, though… That was glorious.

It always worked. Well most of the time. And if a game didn’t start up, the magical blow into the cartridge solved every problem in my little universe.

Mini me want

Today Nintendo, which is already absolutely killing it with Pokemon Go, announced the tiny NES dubbed the Nintendo Classic Mini. The little US$60 machine comes with 30 classic Nintendo games bundled inside, reports Kotaku this evening. No need for cartridges this time. It connects to your TV via HDMI.

It also comes with a “NES Classic Controller,” which is modelled on the iconic original. The whole thing is powered by a USB cable.