I still remember when I first got my NES for Christmas. I was probably about five years old, or so. Can't remember exactly. I got the edition that came with the Nintendo Zapper, and the Super Mario Bros/Duck Hunt combo cartridge. I also got the first Ninja Turtles game, which was the very first game I played on it. I remember waiting for my dad to read all the instructions, and get the NES hooked up. Then finally getting to play it, and wanting to play Ninja Turtles right away. It's silly to think about it nowadays, but back then I didn't know who Mario was. But the Ninja Turtles? Hell yeah. So I booted it up, and had what may have been my very first ever video game experience.

I distinctly remember reaching Bebop, but he was way to hard for me to beat during that first time.

That's cool. I started with a Sega genesis and hard driving.

Sega Genesis came next, for me. Then, because we had the Sega console instead of the Nintendo console, my mom refused to renew my Nintendo Power subscription, because she didn't think getting the Nintendo magazines was worth the money since we had the Sega console. Which made sense, but I didn't care at the time because the subscription ended right in the middle of the Super Metroid comic. So I never got to read the whole thing.

oh no, those comics were the best too.

Case and point is that to this day, I still sometimes bring up Houston during conversations about Metroid. And more often than not, nobody has any idea who I'm talking about. But when they do know, it suddenly becomes the best conversation ever.

One story I like to share was from a Genesis game named Road Rash. (Maybe this one was from 2... or the original. Not sure, anymore.) High speed pursuit. Cop gunning to take me out after I whacked him several times over the head. (He also did quite the smashing to my character.) Blind hill coming up. But had to keep going. No time to slow down. Flew over that hill. Copper took the same abandoned recklessness a second behind me. And then... I see it. Slow moving car in my lane. Still in flight, I could do nothing but watch the outcome. My bike smashed into the back of this car. My character went flying. The HP bar went to China. As for the cop? Exact same results.
...and then things got interesting...
The game engine couldn't handle the judgement on this one. I was KO'ed. Bike trashed. That was a soft game over condition.
-HOWEVER-
The cop had caught me. Another soft game over under the arrested category.
-Confliction-
Except, a dead cop can't arrest me.
-SO...-
The game did the following.
It slowly pulled the camera away from the scene of the two wrecked bikes, traumatized driver and two biker bodies upon the ground.
It normally presents judgement over the soft game over and moves on.
For this combo situation, it ran out of IF/THEN/ELSE commands.
And so... it kept panning out.
And panning out.
And panning out.
The bikes, car and wreck became like a single pixel on the roadmap.
And then even that blinked away and the camera found more terrain to pan out to.
In my mind, I'd like to think it would have panned out into orbit after a couple days of just doing that. But I shut it off after an hour or so.
Seriously, because of the RNG conditons found in that series, I highly doubt that any professional Rasher could ever hope to recreate that unique set of conditions. At least not without tooled assistance.

oh wow!

renting the old Nes from our local gas station

This is first for me, i never heard of gas station renting systems and games.

It was a small local gas station in a small town it even rented VCRs

Still, that's such a cool time in history that i never though of growing up in the city.

oh it's not a city my home town was very small

Saving my Dr. Jones Letter from Startropics as the instructions directed.
Getting to that part of the game, and dashing to the bathroom sink to dunk it.

Amazingly engaging for what's basically a primitive anti piracy measure.

I sadly never got to see the letter in person to this day. Any time i rented it they had the code in the box.