There is no objective history of video games – every player’s experience is different

Depending on where you lived and which consoles or computers you had as a child, the story plays out completely differently - and we should embrace that subjectivity

There is no single objective history of video games. There are certainly elements we can all agree on - the order in which home computers and consoles were launched, the general sweep of technology, from blocky monochrome sprites to vast realistic landscapes - but everyone who plays games holds within them a completely different version of events, based on the machines they owned and the games they loved.

My own history started with arcade machines on the Blackpool seafront in the early 1980s. In 1984, my dad bought a Commodore 64, and a little later I started helping my friend design games for the Dragon 32. I spent my first ever pay cheque on an Atari ST, and then my dad bought our first console, a Mega Drive, which I still have. When I went to university in 1991, I got into PC games, largely because I lived with two computer scientists who set up a LAN in our house so that we could play Doom together. Afterwards, I joined Edge magazine and our key platforms were PlayStation, Saturn and 3DO - but we also had a Neo Geo and a PC Engine in the games room. At the close of the 20th century, I was a Dreamcast fanatic until I folded and embraced the PS2. I was an Xbox 360 player much more than PS3, but I was PS4 more than Xbox One. I've always taken a slalom approach.