1 of 15 BBC Micro - 1986
With school looming for the kids this was the year that my parents decided to get out of London and settle into the commuter belt. We ended up in Gillingham, and a BBC Micro ended up in our house thanks to my Mum's enrolment on a computing course at Mid-Kent College. Only 5 at the time, my memories of BBC gaming are more swirling impressions than hard and fast recollections - the suicidal thrill of attacking a Police Station in Elite, the lurid pinks and blues of Citadel and the hypnotic rhythm of Repton's head-bobbing. We were also treated to what seemed a vast supply of free games thanks to charitable geeks on Mum's course, with standouts including Nutter - in which you patrol the screen from side to side with a tiny-but-massive-headed Adolf Hitler, leaping to headbutt incoming Allied bombs - and Arcadians, which introduced me to the fickle nature of computers early by loading successfully only when it felt like it.

2 of 15 Double Dragon and R-Type - 1987
Summers in Medway were long and boring, this being in the days before pre-adolescent joyriding really took off. With all the local trees climbed and abandoned mansions explored we were forced to rely on our pitiful municipal facilities, mostly in the shape of the Black Lion Sports Centre. The only good thing about having nothing better to do than go swimming three or four times a week was that in the reception area where we'd wait to get picked up were twin cabs which, from 1987 to around 1989, hosted Double Dragon and R-Type. They became my introduction to glorious, textured and colourful gaming; with my only experiences so far being on the BBC, I was totally captivated by the noise and beauty of these shambling black boxes. Whether I was playing or - more likely - watching, I knew I'd seen something special and I knew I wanted more...

3 of 15 Master System - 1988
...and more is exactly what the Master System gave us. Using the classic and shameless lie that 'we'll save money cos we won't have to play arcades,' my brother and I successfully lobbied for Sega's 8-Bit machine after signing away several years of future birthday and Christmas presents. I was enormously pleased with just owning the thing, let alone playing the games - I've never felt prouder than when asked by a guest at the Great Birthday Party Unveiling how long the loading times were; 'There *are* no loading times!' I triumphantly responded. After it had mesmerised me in the arcade, in-house R-Type felt like a proud and rare beast held captive, and discovering areas we'd never had the combination of money and skill to reach on the Black Lion cab was like trespassing on hallowed ground. I was hooked.

4 of 15 Megadrive - 1991
Brand loyalty saw us upgrade to the Megadrive in 1991. Memories of Sega's 16-bit machine are more vivid and immediate than anything before it, partly because I was finally old enough to really appreciate the experience and partly because I still have the machine even now, bolted to a Mega-CD II and laid atop a mountain of games in the attic. After earlier flirtations, the Megadrive was the first love of my gaming life, the one against which all subsequent loves would be judged - unfairly, much of the time, through skewed, romantic eyes. The games we played back then seem to tower above nearly everything since: Dad's fantasy influence guided us towards adventure in Battlemaster, The Immortal, Arcus Oddysey and Landstalker; I loved exploring the sci-fi worlds of Starflight, Flashback and The Chaos Engine; and EA games - with their stretched, yellow-tabbed cartidges - were a sign of quality and ingenuity, rather than the corporate mediocrity they represent today. This is the machine I grew up with, and never got over.

5 of 15 Doom - 1994
The 80s were hard on Gillingham, and by the time we moved out to the quiet town of Cuxton in 1992 it'd become worse than our old London address. God bless my parents for working hard to keep me and my bro in a decent neighbourhood, but it absolutely murdered my social life - school, and most of my friends, were now 10 miles away. Luckily, along with the new house my parents also dropped a grand on a then-impressive Pentium 60 (16MB of RAM! 100MB hard drive!) so I entered my teenage years with a shotgun in hand and a mission to shoot Hell to shit in time to a righteous Rage Against The Machine soundtrack. Early Save-and-Worry gameplay eventually became a storming run-and-gun invincibility - Doom was the first game I got *really* good at, and the first game anyone ever watched me play just because I was doing it so well; at a girlfriend's house I heard her younger brother and friends whispering 'Is he cheating, or is he just that good?' As someone who never really got involved in the public parade of the arcades this was quite a moment for me.

6 of 15 TIE Fighter - 1994
The only game that Doom ever gave way for. I bought it because it was Star Wars, but I loved it because it was fast enough to make me feel like a badass Imperial Pilot and complex enough to make it seem like I was controlling a starship. The deep-space dogfighting was spectacular, but the real joy was craft management; my keyboard became a control panel as I diverted thruster power to rear shields, or switched to ion cannons and altered phaser firing pattern to disable a fleeing shuttle. The mechanic behind it all was deceptively simple - basic tiered control of weapons, engine and shields - but knowing the commands inside out and making crucial changes during battle was an absolute buzz. Tie this immersive play to that John Williams score and you have one boy acting out his Star Wars fantasies on a nightly basis. Magic.

7 of 15 Gun.smoke - 1995
A family holiday to Spain in 1995 provided me with a rare brush with the arcades. A surly, miserable bastard of a 14 year-old, one of the few things I deigned to take pleasure in during our trip was the Gun.smoke cab parked by the campsite bar. What started as a quick pre-beach mosey soon escalated into a peseta-slinging obsession, as I grew more and more certain I could nab top spot on the leader board. I'd reached second place by departure day, when I was given one last crack at the high score thanks to my parents ditching all their Spanish shrapnel. I remember an adrenaline-pumped walk to the bar, feeding the machine and whacking '1up'. I remember the exhilaration of reaching a previously unseen level, flinging my body left and right as I dodged through unfamiliar territory on reaction alone. What I don't remember is whether I got the bastard score or not. Stupid bastard memory.

8 of 15 Goldeneye - 1999
I got into this late - a good year or two after release - thanks to that same ex-girlfriend's younger brother (an early sign that things weren't going right was that I'd rather hit up the hard-as-fuck time challenges with him than spend time with her). Then, having made the big Uni move North to Sheffield in September 1999, I ended up spending the following summer alone in our student house. My days were strung-out and structureless, and I couldn't stop thinking about the still-unlocked Goldeneye secrets. Like a relapsed junkie looking to score, I stumbled down to the seedy second-hand Castle Games and struck a deal for an N64, Goldeneye and Mariokart for £50, carrying it back four miles to the house slung over my shoulder in a black bin bag. This is the only time I played a game to death to nail an achievement, and it took me all bastard summer (plus a trip to the Uni IT centre to download a video of a games tester acing The Facility - 'Ah, so that's how you fucking do it'). Worth it though.

9 of 15 Tekken 3 - 1999
I'd chosen self-catered flats at University because I'd visited older friends who had communal kitchens and it seemed like a right laugh. I wasn't wrong; I lucked out with five top-class flatmates - one of whom had a chipped PlayStation - and the kitchen was the setting for our best times together. Installed along with a portable TV on our tiny dining table, the PSX ran the game that defined this era - a ripped Japanese version of Tekken 3. Two of us in particular - my still-best mate and I - played all hours, he with Paul and I with Law. Not only did we get bloody good at the game - occasional bouts against neighbouring flats were embarrassing mis-matches - but, playing mostly in isolation, we each became experts on each other's style. Our marathon sessions evolved into tactics-heavy cat and mouse battles, exhilarating to play in and pretty damn good to watch.

10 of 15 Pro Evo - 2000
I started off hating PES. The PSX-owning flatmate introduced me to it in our second year, and my reaction then was exactly as it is to every new incarnation of the series now: 'The fucking shooting's cocked.' But this is PES all over - everyone hates it at first. The learning curve is a bastard right-angle and figuring out how to score goals takes an infuriating age. I was fully aware of the fact that I hated the game, but it had something that kept me coming back until I eased gradually into its idiosyncracies. We started with ISS Pro Evo and went all the way through to Pro Evo 2 on Ps2 before we ran out of University to play it in.

11 of 15 GTA III - 2001
Our flat of six had become a house of six when we were collectively blown away by GTA III. What we know now - this is the game that dominated its generation and introduced its defining open-world focus - came to us as a unheralded marvel. Three or four of us would sit and take turns to explore the city, run through missions or - more usually - find a bus and go on traffic-compacting terror run. I can pinpoint precisely the moment I realised GTA III was a classic - we were sat in the basement watching The World's Wildest Police Chases. Some backwater road cops were closing in on a truck-driving loon - he swerved to avoid traffic, flipping his vehicle, and we erupted into a critical cacophony of what he should have done. Amateur.

12 of 15 Halo - 2002
The period right after I finished my degree was a tough one - post-university blundering had merged with surprise new parenting role. Sarah's degree still had a year to run, and with a career in academia in mind I'd enrolled for the 12-month Masters course. My Dad very generously put us up in a flat, albeit in one of the shaider parts of town. I'd seen Halo running - my Tekken buddy showed me the Master Chief taking his first steps onto the ring world - and I was totally sold by the lush open spaces and obscenely smooth controls. I spent the summer as a telephone jockey in Telewest customer services - truly the worst fucking job I've ever had, this convinced me that the central circle of Hell was a bureaucratic circle and I was working in it - and afterwards bought an Xbox to reward myself. It was a massive luxury; I knew it, and I made the most out of it, hosting LAN parties and all nighters at my pokey flat and replaying campaign until the sticks on my fat Xbox pad went limp.

13 of 15 Mario 64 - 2003
During the Masters course I applied to the government for PhD funding. I was turned down, but to stay involved with the English Department before re-applying the following year I took a job managing their Video Library. It paid next to nothing, so to save money I dusted off the N64 and became a second-hand vulture. Mario was one of many I bought at the time. I knew it had a big reputation but I'd never liked the idea of 3D platformers - cameras squirming away from you and crooked perspective. Of course I was as wrong as it's possible to be, and this was a gem. Guiding a gorgeously-animated tumbling Mario through the bright, vibrant world was joyous; becoming a Dad had put me off the mass of chrome-polished racers and GTA clones which dominated the PS2/Xbox catalogues, and Mario was a brilliantly innocent and happy antidote.

14 of 15 PlayStation 2 - 2004
Obviously I'd been playing PS2 for ages, but it became particularly important to me in 2004. £500 came through from University for a prize I'd won on the Masters, and I used it to buy my own PS2, along with copies of Pro Evo 3, Ico and Rez. I hammered PES, playing 6 seasons of Master League, loved the haunting Ico, and was non-plussed by Rez.

The £500 also stretched to buying me a suit, which I wore at the interview which secured me a job as staff writer on Official PS2 Magazine. I'd just sent off my new application for PhD funding without much hope of success and decided to give up on academia and apply for a few jobs. I got a blank rejection from Games TM (boo! hiss!) but got through to an interview day at OPS2. Cue a train journey down to Bath from Sheffield (the first of many, it would turn out) and a successful interview process. With Sarah finishing her course we moved South at the beginning of July into an even smaller flat in Keynsham (completely floored though I was by Bath's stunning architecture and obscenely beautiful valleys we couldn't afford to live in the city itself). I spent three dazzling summer months learning about magazines, making some great friends and playing an awful lot of PES before word came through that I'd been offered a three-year PhD scholarship back in Sheffield. I took it for the money - more than I was being paid on the magazine - and that's pretty much me.

15 of 15 World Of Warcraft - 2005
Dolg laughs.
Dolg laughs.
Dolg rolls on the floor and laughs at you.
Dolg wishes he'd never started playing this awesomely designed but essentially empty and utterly consuming digital crack