One of the things my mother and I did for fun back in the day was just go to the mall and walk around looking at stuff. Well, she would mostly go looking at stuff while I made a beeline towards Sears, and specifically the videogame section. Back in those days, they had the gaming kiosks where you could try out a few games, but they were like… normal. If you have ever been to Walmart or wherever lately, the new kiosks have long been designed to be at the most uncomfortable neck angle possible, presumably to encourage people to play for 5 minutes and move on.

Jokes on them, but we would hang out for hours. Which, incidentally, is how I discovered that Sears was the place to go. EB Games had more kiosks and was obviously more focused on games generally, but that also meant it had higher foot traffic and thus kiosk turnover. I wasn’t going to hog the kiosk, if someone else came up and wanted a turn. If no one came up though? Fair game.

Anyway, it was the beginning of summer one year, and my mother noticed that I really liked playing this one particular SNES game that had recently came out: Star Fox. And during this particular summer, we happened to be going to the mall a lot more than normal. I figured something was up, but had not quite put the pieces together yet. I was just happy to be gaming with something new.

And then it happened. I beat Star Fox in its entirety at the Sears SNES kiosk. A few weeks later, my birthday game was… Star Fox.

My mother had put Star Fox on layaway and thus been heading to the mall so often so she could add to the payments. I felt genuinely awful, like I had wasted weeks of her life (and paychecks). I’m not sure if I spilled the beans later on, but at the time, I definitely pretended like it was game I was super interested in playing. Which… it kinda had been up to that point.

After that, I definitely made sure that I never asked for a game that I had played at a kiosk. Kind of the opposite situation the marketing departments were going for, but that was the 90s.