The eight best advances in gaming during the last decade | Keith Stuart

For 13 years I've hung around like a tricky end-of-level boss. On my last day as the Guardian's games editor, here's how the industry has grown since I started

In July 2004, Neil McIntosh, then head of blogging at the Guardian, posted a story on the newspaper's growing website. "Welcome to Gamesblog, the videogames weblog from the Guardian," he wrote. "Our aim here is to talk about games in an entertaining, adult way, and help you enjoy playing games on whatever gadget you own - PC, games console, handheld device or mobile phone. We hope you find things are a little different around here."

Alongside Aleks Krotoski and Greg Howson, I was one of the writers brought on to contribute daily stories, news and personal opinions to this formative gaming blog - and while my compatriots eventually moved on, I hung around like a particularly tricky end-of-level boss, obsessively documenting the changing face of the industry. Back then, we thought the medium was about to enter a period of extraordinary change. We were right.