1 of 15 Astro Wars
Paul Bartley brought this in to school on games day. It was shit, but for some reason, it inspired us to start our own kids’ detective agency. We put a sign up in his living-room window promising that we could solve "any mystery". But his mum took it down.

2 of 15 Invaders (BBC Micro)
We had a Physics teacher called Mr Turner who doubled up on Computer Studies. He’d blabber on about ‘theory’ for half an hour and then stick this on for the final, ‘practical’ ten minutes. The thrill of legitimately playing a videogame in stuffy old school was dizzying. Joyously, Mr Turner kept track of everyone’s high scores in a little notepad. Sometime in the third year, he was suddenly and mysteriously replaced by a tashy little twerp whose idea of fun was allowing us to use different-coloured pens to outline the individual sections of flowcharts.

3 of 15 Star Fire (Arcade)
A 3D shooter that used a kind of conceptual tracing paper to steal the soul of Star Wars. As a wide-eyed ten-year-old, the sit-down cabinet felt theatrical and transforming. I could leave behind the trials and tussles of childhood and step directly into my imagination: still-forming fingers stabbing at the pointy laser buttons; having to use most of my puny upper-body strength to even move the yoke joystick. All those swirling, space-pilot fantasies becoming reality for a few precious minutes…

4 of 15 Robotron (Arcade)
I grew up in Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire. Someone had to. Once I hit pocket-money age, I navigated the town centre via a holy trinity of three ‘amusement’ arcades: Shipley’s, Pleasure Island and Mr Nudge. All three of them had Robotron, but Pleasure Island had it turned up loudest, on the hardest difficulty, always with a crowd around and a rack of grubby 10p pieces propped against the screen. It was local lore that an All-Time highest on Pleasure Island’s Robotron was the only one that mattered.

I learned the game by watching two older, patchouly oil-stinking, denim-jacketed ‘greasers’/’fribbos’ called Harris and Raggety. They played single-player, alternating lives. Occasionally, they’d let me take a life, but when they saw how good I was getting, they stopped doing that. When the suppliers finally retired Robotron for – sigh – Golden Axe, the All-Time high score table showed Harris and Raggety’s score second, mine first. Perhaps it still does, somewhere.

5 of 15 Moon Cresta (Arcade)
I once made an obscene suggestion to Joanne Griffiths in double Chemistry. She brooded for the whole lesson and, bang on the bell, leaned over and rasped in my ear, “You need help. You’re a sick boy!” So I started using ‘SB’ as my high-score alias...

Moon Cresta was burrowed away in the darkest corner of an arcade in Tunstall – way off the sight-line of the change-booth. I never really liked the game all that much, but it was special because it allowed the entry of TEN letters on the high-score table, and so I could easily write ‘Sickboy’ in full.

I played Moon Cresta a lot with Dave Dutton, who had a habit of kicking and punching the machine when he lost a life. Sometimes he would spit on the screen – and then angrily wipe it off and carry on. I think it might have been a mild Tourette’s thing. Some of his high-score entries included ‘LICKOUT’, ‘WANKMEOFF’, ‘FUCKCUNT’ and – best – ‘DUTT.OK.VD’ – as if mentioning venereal disease alongside your name would give you some kind of sexual charisma with the local girls. Who would never see it, anyway.

6 of 15 Atari VCS
In the ‘70s, my dad had a fishing buddy called Pete Handley. For reasons that it never felt wise to investigate, his nickname was ‘Maggot’. I remember visiting his poky little house in a scuzzy end of Stoke, spotting this under his telly, and wondering what the hell a grown man with a moustache could possibly be using it for.

When the adults were talking, I gorged on the retina-frying flicker and static crunch of Space Invaders and Asteroids and plotted how I was going to rescue the damned thing from this brown and beige, fag-stinking living room and re-house it somewhere more rightful and righteous among my Bruce Lee posters and Spider-Man comics.

My dad eventually bought it off Maggot when he got bored with it. But it never worked properly on our telly.

7 of 15 Sinclair Spectrum
In my adolescent ‘80s, I went through a period of ‘seeing’ a series of slightly older girls because their make-up was better and the gossip was dirtier. One of them had a Saturday job in the local ‘Micro Centre’ computer shop and I would regularly wander in and chat to her because she had excitingly large tits that strained against the cheap white blouse they made her wear. I think she got me a tenner off a 16k Spectrum ‘Horizons’ starter pack… She wouldn’t let me touch her tits and finished with me soon after. But the Spectrum remained.

8 of 15 The Sorceror of Claymorgue Castle (Spectrum)
As a potential writer, text adventures seemed the perfect way to marry my loves for words and gaming. Coding manuals made me feel ill, so I used an authoring program called The Quill to write a few of my own, forcing copies onto Spectrum-owning mates.

As a player, I always preferred the work of frighteningly hirsute, sex pest-resembling American Scott Adams to the pseudy, faux-literary efforts with off-the-peg Orcs and elves and about half a screen’s worth of description for each location. Looking back, I was getting a similar home-fix from Adams’ notoriously obtuse and unfriendly games as I was getting from Eugene Jarvis’ uncompromising arcade-game design. I liked the feeling of against-the-odds combat; that it was me against a maker who’d done everything possible to ensure I didn’t win.

The Sorceror Of Claymorgue Castle is easily Adams’ most sadistic flex of sick and twisted genius: multiple paths, random deaths, beyond-obscure solutions you could easily spend most of your life weeping over… If I ever meet the bastard, I will demand some kind of compensation for the mental anguish caused by the bit where you have to PUSH SOUTH WALL. I mean, Jesus.

9 of 15 Dragon's Lair (Arcade)
I was banned from Shipley’s for being too good at this. Alarmingly large crowds would gather as I skipped through the cartoon/game/memory-test, section by section. Occasionally, I’d lose a life on the Lizard King bit, but I could usually get through the whole thing untouched. One Saturday afternoon, the manager stopped me as I was leaving and told me I was ‘barred’. When I asked why, he said, “Because this isn’t a place to come and show off to your mates!” That confused me, because I’d always thought that was exactly what it was supposed to be.

10 of 15 Lemmings (Amiga)
I’m too immature for puzzle games. They just make me confused and angry. But Lemmings makes me smile, puts me at peace. When I went to university, I abandoned videogames for drugs and girls and sandwich-toasting and being in a band and all that. After graduation, I lolled around for a while in that queasy gap between student-doss and real-world. A mate brought his Amiga over to my squalid little rented limbo and we spent an entire weekend tag-teaming through Lemmings, level by increasingly cunty level, fuelled by cheap coffee and skanky dope.

A few days before, I’d applied for a job writing for a videogame magazine and it was being able to bullshit about Lemmings’ pristine, lateral purity that got me the job. That, and knowing how to use apostrophes properly.

11 of 15 Street Fighter 2 (SNES)
So I moved to Bath in the early ‘90s to start writing for magazines. At first, I was paid just enough to cover a shitty, first-floor bedsit overlooking a cemetery. In the week, I lived out a second wind of studentyness, working with a bunch of peers in an office with constant music and comedy tapes and a little side gaming ‘review’ room. At lunchtimes, we’d play Street Fighter 2 until our fingers tingled with the whisper of impending RSI.

We set up regular knockout tournaments with other mags. I remember playing one match one-handed - manipulating the D-pad with my thumb and jabbing at the attack buttons with a curled-around index finger. I won – and the loser threw his pad across the room and broke it and we had to blag a new one off the PR woman at US Gold.

12 of 15 SNES
Life in Bath soon took on a steady rhythm: I’d cane it on weekdays - at the local 1am-closing bar or getting stoned as a little beetle around various people’s rented Georgian flats – and then shut myself away for a weekend recharge. I had my one room, my Happy Shopper tea and biscuits, my shitty stereo, my instant food and my glorious SNES to transport me into the epic, cartoon otherworlds of Zelda: A Link To The Past and Super Mario World. Still, the pop of a fork piercing the film of a microwave meal: the loneliest sound in the world…

13 of 15 Championship Manager (PC)
Sometime in the late ‘90s I found myself commuting from Bath to London every day, trying to catch enough time with my wife in the frantic mornings and frazzled evenings. After a stark, thousand yard-staring burnout, I quit my job to go freelance and prepare for impending fatherhood, whatever it might be. At first, I just felt spare and adrift. Championship Manager nursed me through the darkest parts, warping time from the moment I kissed my wife out of the door to late afternoon when I would prepare for her return by finally getting dressed and making it look like I’d been busy all day. The pop psychologist in me scrubs its chin at how the game’s precision of control over everything compensated for the way my life at the time felt so scary and out of control. So that’s it, then.

14 of 15 Ikaruga (Gamecube/Dreamcast)
Again, all the fun of the fight-back. And because I like things that are both horrifying and beautiful.

15 of 15 The Legend of Zelda;The Ocarina of Time (N64)
Miyamoto’s masterpiece; alive with drama and danger and wit and joy and scope and soul.

It flickers in my mind like the memory of a secret life; a sort of parallel childhood. The rational, grown-up part of me insists that it’s Just A Game, but there’s a restorative, transcendent quality: a crackle of magic.

Ocarina Of Time’s fantasy isn’t the usual adolescent stew of wild and weird and elaborate imaginings. It’s all about empathy and projection: the demons run deep; the monstrous bosses your own private Goliaths; the quest evoking that bittersweet push/pull of putting aside childish things and striking out into the grand unknown: of ‘growing up’. And the time-shift device unlocks everyone’s ultimate daydream: forever young.

I have a tendency to pine, and Ocarina makes me ache for simpler days; when I wasn’t so claimed and ‘busy’. When all the time in the world was all I needed.