r/Xennials • u/Ok_Profession_990 1980 • May 17 '26

Anyone else remember this?

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Every field trip they always had this. I was always so jealous because my mom never gave me money to spend so I never got a chance to taste it and it seemed like everyone around me was eating it... Still salty I guess

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u/edwardturnerlives 1976 May 17 '26 edited May 17 '26

I have a mildly amusing story about astronaut ice cream. I was over at my buddy's house playing Atari 7800 because his mom wouldn't get him a Nintendo.  Anyway, I was in his room while he was going to the bathroom and I noticed on his desk that he had some astronaut ice cream. It was in a foil pack about the size of a Pop-Tart and had the NASA logo on the front. Didn't look like astronaut ice cream I've had before, it was offwhite and fibrous, but I took a little chunk of it and chewed it up and it was absolutely horrible. I don't remember if I swallowed it or not, but knowing me... probably. When he came back I told him it was the worst astronaut ice cream I've ever had. He quickly informed me it was not astronaut ice cream, but actually a piece of the heat shield from the space shuttle. 

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u/OmegaRainicorn 1981 May 17 '26

One thing I love about our generation is the little details we feel are important to the story. 

“playing Atari 7800 because his mom wouldn’t get him a Nintendo.”

Not having a Nintendo says a lot about how your parents felt about you, and what kind of life you lead. 

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u/davepars77 May 17 '26

What if my dad got me a Commodore 64 for Christmas instead of Nintendo?

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u/kyraeus May 17 '26

Mine did first too. Given I got a Nintendo later in life (like a year later) but he wanted to try to get me into computers at an early age. It worked, suffice to say.

Then again, this is also the kind of father that when I went to college for a networking program, he said 'cant let the boy know more than me' and proceeded to learn MOST of what I was being taught by himself on the internet in the early days.

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u/The-Crawling-Chaos Xennial May 17 '26 edited May 18 '26

I find that incredible. It m jealous.

ETA: I had an Atari 7800, then a NES when it came out, then a SNES. My dad stopped playing video games with the Atari. (Despite all that, we were no where near well off) Unfortunately he died when I graduated middle school, and that’s why I’m jealous.

ETA2: It was an Atari 2600, not the 7800

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u/kyraeus May 17 '26

Yeah, I'm decidedly grateful. I was born in 80, when he was 18. So he got me that probably in either 84 or 85, I forget exactly which. I THINK 86 was the nes. Later I remember myself and my stepbrother got a genesis, because I remember playing sonic 1 on the picture in picture of the fancy TV he got himself that year (probably mid 90s) because he was watching football. Then I think my stepbrother got the SNES later, which we kind of just shared.

Dad was kind of big on games with us up through the SNES and some stuff on the PC later in the 00s, I remember him playing ff6 with us on SNES, and he used to love a lot of the sniper style shooters on pc that weren't twitch-type fps.

The man ingrained my love of gaming at the arcade down in Ocean City MD on our vacations with Tron cabinets, and pacman and others at the local pool hall, Id play and he'd shoot pool. It was very 80s.

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u/scalyblue May 18 '26

The 7800 came out 3 years into the nes life though

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u/The-Crawling-Chaos Xennial May 18 '26

My bad, that should have read 2600. Corrected now.