Sometime when I was around 15 or 16, a wonderful thing happened.  Videogames started to proliferate, and the country entered the age of the video arcade.  My friends and I dumped countless quarters into:

And my personal favorite...

It wasn't long till one of our gang ended up with one of these for Christmas and a tiny little color TV in his room:

We saved a lot of quarters after that.  And this was my first real exposure to a game console.  Why didn't I buy one of my own, you ask?  Well, I had just turned 16, had a job and a car, and had just discovered girls. Girls seemed to prefer to be taken out to video arcades instead of hunkering around a tiny color TV in a guy's friend's room.