1985 - nobody beats the wiz

If you grew up in North Jersey in the 1980s, Route 17 in Paramus wasn't just a road—it was a retail battleground. And right in the thick of it, attached to the Garden State Plaza, stood a neon-lit temple of electronics: The Wiz).

The Wiz was the destination for audio gear, packed to the gills with massive receivers, wood-paneled speakers, and dual-cassette decks. While my sister and my dad were evaluating home stereos, I wandered off toward the center of the showroom floor. And that’s when I saw it. Rising up from the retail floor was a massive, seven-foot-tall interactive display kiosk. It was all for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES).

To trick retailers into stocking it, Nintendo pitched the NES not as a console, but as a high-tech toy system. Because they were terrified it would flop, they did a hyper-limited test market of only 100,000 units, completely exclusive to the New York metro area. Because we lived in Bergen County, we were standing at the epicenter for the initial release. In fact, Nintendo had conducted its top-secret focus groups in Paramus and set up its launch headquarters right next door in a Hackensack warehouse.

Nintendo wasn’t selling a cheap, streamlined console yet. If you wanted the NES during that exclusive 1985 window, you had to buy the massive, top-tier NES Deluxe Set. It cost a staggering $299.99—which, adjusted for inflation today, is the equivalent of handing over more than $850 at the cash register.

A few days later, I came home from a normal day at school, walked through the door, and there it was. We had the original "smooth top" cartridges, the pre-ban all-grey Zapper, and a robot operating on our living room floor. By the time Nintendo rolled the console out nationwide in late 1986, they realized kids just wanted to play Super Mario Bros., and they began phasing the expensive robot out of the spotlight. But for a brief, magical window at the end of '85, it was the ultimate high-tech future.

My sister got her music, I got a piece of history that saved the entire video game industry, and to this day, I can safely say: when it came to surprising his kids, nobody beat my dad.