I feel kinda fortunate I lived with a bunch of my siblings for a good majority of my life. Basically, it reduced my need for any friends outside the house. I had enough to deal with in my house. Catching shows on TV, setting reservations to play games on the consoles (back in my day, we had 8-bits and low resolutions). It was fun for what it was worth. Especially when you consider my social life as well. Let's just say, had not been for family, I probably wouldn't have gotten over all the bullying and crap I had to deal with with school and such. Games were also a great distraction.
Hell, with games, I've been all over playing Sonic, hanging out with our neighbor (who had a Nintendo) and playing some Mario, learning tricks and cheats for games via word-of-mouth (before this internet thing kicked in), hell, LP's were held in-house before we were even aware of the concept of Let's Play. Quite a few times have I assisted in taking over Arrakis with my brother, and tried to rule the world in my pathetic attempts to conquer my brothers. I've been a rookie on the front lines of my brother's X-Com force, and ruled my own outpost at the time. Saving Earth from Vorticons was also a fun quest to do once in awhile. And for the hell of it, I took on all sorts of flying challenges and flew all sorts of exotic aircraft, ranging from a flying pig to an X-Wing and eventually Tie Fighters.
I had a pretty fun childhood, despite my crappy social life. Oddly enough, I feel my inner child wants to relive the past and get parts of it right nowadays (It seems more along the lines of beating games I never beat or have been meaning to beat. Thank God for emulation and the Internet). It better not be a case of feeling old. Would be worse if it's because the world is changing for the worse, and I want to get it over with before no more opportunities are left to enjoy. In the meantime, especially before COICA is signed (hopefully not), I'm snagging as much as I can, from old shows I watched back then, to games from all sorts of consoles I had, and then some. So far, my machine is a virtual encyclopedia of gaming and childhood history of gaming and shows. I've made myself a "cool uncle" by my attempts to pass down the torch of what I used to play and such to the next generation of my family. This is the stuff I used to play to show that games that require the use of hands are not a child's toy (that Back to the Future II scene bothered the hell outta me).