Did you also walk fifteen miles up hill both ways to school? Times change, but even back in the Nintendo Power days people would definitely flock to the home of whoever got Super Mario World 2 or Super Smash Bros first because there was no way to play those online and everyone would then talk about the games.
Nintendo was never that big in most European countries, when we talked about games on the playground during primary school it was about Game & Watch devices.
During highschool we were trading Spectrum, C64, PC and Amiga stuff on the playground, no one cared about consoles.