Do you ever think about cords?

I remember being 9 years old, growing up on an American army base in Germany. I remember a day there very well, a day where I had just received Phantasy Star 4 for my Sega, and A Link to The Past for my Snes. I had 3 friends over after school that day, and we ripped into Phantasy Star 4 first. After getting a few towns in, the consensus was that we stop and switch to Zelda, which meant that I had to lay down on my side, slide behind the dresser, and switch the consoles. I had to unhook the Sega cord coming out the back of my tv, then screw on the Snes cord, then unplug the giant Sega brick from the outlet, replacing it with the gray Snes brick.

Cords back in the day were a galactic pain in the ass. When the Dreamcast/PS2/Xbox/Gamecube era came around, I had 8 consoles dedicated to one tv, meaning the cord-work behind the dresser now came with an Amazon rainforest of cords to crawl through. However, I had them all memorized. I knew PS2 color cords apart from the Xbox's, and I could easily pick out the Saturn's power brick despite it looking identical to others. Cords were an art, not one that I miss, but a necessary evil during the retro days. To this day I have yet to encounter an electronic that I have been unable to hook up or set-up properly, and I give credit to the trillions of cords that I have untangled and sifted through in my lifetime.

I think about my son Oliver and the total lack of cord knowledge that he will have. I was born in 1987, which means that the NES was the current system at the time. Looking at what we have now, and seeing how advanced we have become since then, a startling fact always bubbles up; when Oliver was born, the current systems were 360/PS3. Those are the consoles that were at their prime when he was born. By the time he is a teenager, do you think his video game systems will have cords? Will they even have controllers? With all of those amazing NES/Snes/Sega games that we grew up with looking more and more outdated with each day, how are we ever going to convince our children that they are worth experiencing? I just hope that Oliver can maintain a level of patience while watching his father untangle the Sega cords for over an hour just to show off how awesome Battletoads is.