The One About Rock Band

As soon as I stopped believing in Santa, my parents gave up on trying to hide what I was having for Christmas so while I had plenty of stuff I loved, none really registered as a great surprise and they all blur together. So unlike most commenters I would pick something from adulthood and from a birthday, not Christmas.

When I turned 24 I was living in Paris where I had found my first “real” job, and so did about half of the people I graduated with so I had plenty of friends around (and most of those who didn’t move to Paris lived about 1h by train from there). We were all engineers (or so our diploma said, I never really worked as one) so we made a decent living but life in Paris is expensive so we weren’t swimming in money either, so it came out of nowhere when during a birthday bash thrown at our place (3 of us were sharing a flat conveniently set above a dentist office and below a pretty much deaf lady, so no one ever complained about the noise), my friends got me the full Rock Band set with guitar, drums and microphone. That’s the only gaming gift I ever had that I don’t remember expecting, and it’s conveniently a great party game that we played for the rest of the night. Most of those people are still my friends, so it’s still a fond memory to me. —Nassim Tekaya