1 of 15 Firefox
I grew up in a small village in East Kent (very close to Sandwich) in an age when television stations numbered three and viable forms of entertainment included pitching black ants against their accursed red rivals. So my two younger brothers – Stuart and Stephen – and I spent a large portion of our waking time looking forward to Christmas in the hope it would bring new toys to fill the void. Part of the build up to the main event was the arrival of the winter edition of the Great Universal catalogue whose pages we would scour first for ladies underwear and then the collection of Grandstand-produced LCD games. How we dreamed of owning an Astro Wars, Caveman or Electronic Battleships. The hints were never taken though, so I saved up a year’s worth of pocket money and picked up every half penny found down the back of the sofa until I had enough to buy Firefox F-7. It was crap.

2 of 15 Match Day (Spectrum)
Enlightenment reached the Kentish household during Christmas of 1985 when my bros and I unwrapped a 48K+ Spectrum, complete with Tomahawk, Hyper Sports and Match Day. Mum and dad tried to put an educational slant on it by saying we could learn to programme on it. Hahahhahahahahahahahh. Anyway, Match Day was probably my most played Speccy-title (which was really saying something in those days). To this day I remember my first win at International level – a victory at all costs, exposing of a slight bug that meant if you had the ball and faced towards the touchline, the CPU opponent would stand dutifully by your side rather than tackle you. Sniff, they were the days...

3 of 15 Margate
No summation of my formative years in gaming could be complete without a trip down memory lane to Margate. My best mate Gary's mum used to play Bingo there on a Sunday afternoon so we would scrounge a lift and proceed to migrate along the length of the strip like a pair of sharks. Well, a pair of useless, toothless porbeagles anyway, reeling from one humiliating 30 seconds on Afterburner to another. Star Wars, Space Harrier, Double Dragon - no game was immune to our inherent shitness. But that was not the point - it was the fleeting thrill of playing away from home that meant so much. That and those awesome vanilla/strawberry whippy ice creams.

4 of 15 Chase HQ (Spectrum)
When the ice caps melt, the ozone burns away, and mankind perishes, what will be his legacy? How will he be remembered? As the inventor of the wheel, the engine and the gun? The being who harnessed fire and gravity? The creator of timeless poetry and painting? Nah, fuck that - it will be for squeezing Chase HQ into the ZX Spectrum. Christmas 1989 brought a veritable miracle and I have never stopped thanking Ocean for the memories. Let's go Mr driver!

5 of 15 Amiga
I remained loyal to the Speccy for six years - right up until the end of my first year studying English at Salford University. But then my bro Steve got himself an Amiga, and that was the end of the 8-bit generation for me. Kicks Offs 1 and 2 and Sensible Soccer inspired horrible addictions, but it was the powerful aesthetics of the likes of The Chaos Engine, Lionheart and Shadow of the Beast that I remember most vividly. I don't think I have ever been so blown away by the shift from one generation to another.

6 of 15 WWF Royal Rumble (SNES)
Of all the games to inspire you to go out and buy a SNES - Super Mario World, Zelda, F-Zero - it was the prospect of The Undertaker tombstoning Razor Ramon in WWF Royal Rumble that proved irresistible. Thing is, we had to work like wrestlers to pay for it. During the summer holidays t'other brother Stu and I worked on a local farm - driving forklifts, shifting on the back of a blackcurrant picker and shovelling grain in silos. It was a 12-hour days but it paid well, and at the end of the first week we had headed to Canterbury Computer Centre clutching our little brown pay packets. For the rest of that summer, standing knee deep in a lazy whirpool of Oilseed Rape, the dust stinging my eyes and the sweat pouring into the nicks on my shins made by my tired and careless spade work, I pushed myself on, knowing I was shovelling for Street Fighter 2 Turbo, Super Probotector and Cybernator.

7 of 15 NHL 94 (SNES)
I have never professed to be much of a gamer - my lack of twitch gaming skills was a constant source of disappointment during puberty. I am sure that is why the girls turned a blind eye to my charms. But one game...man, I was unbeatable. I could have taken you ALL. I am talking about NHL 94 - and it cost me my 2:1 in English. I had deliberately left the SNES at home during the final term of the third year so as not to face tempation. The revision was going well until two weeks before the first exam, when in the quiet of the afternoon, I heard the immortal words, "EA Sports...it's in the game". One of the freshers downstairs had bought himself a SNES to celebrate the end of his exams, and with that, my fate was sealed. Milton took a back seat to the Pittsburgh Penguins, and a string of poor exams dragged my average down to 59% and a 2(ii). Oh NHL 94! You wicked, wicked mistress.

8 of 15 Wipeout 2097 (Playstation)
In 1996 I left Manchester for a year-long course in journalism at a college in Sheffield. Money was tight and I was forced to live off the fat of my SNES - Super Punch Out, ISS Deluxe, Doom etc. It had been a matter of some pride that I had never needed a student loan to get by...until I walked into Virgin Megastore around October time and clapped eyes on Wipeout 2097. It was something about the way those blue vapour trails criss-crossed in the dark tunnels. Utterly hypnotizing! When I came to, I was in the college office filling out the application forms for a £1,200 loan.

9 of 15 Guardian Heroes (Saturn)
June 8, 2001, was the day after the General Election in which Labour had retained its hold on Government. In a small office next Leicester Train station I too was consolidating my power with promotion to the role of editor of the regional office of Raymonds Press Agency. It was here that I first had the opportunity to explore the Internet and it was not long before I had become addicted to eBay. It was a portal to all of those games I had ever wanted, and none more so than Guardian Heroes. I had never forgotten those graphics in C+VG and when I bought it I did not actually have a Saturn to play it on. To this day, it remains my favourite game.

10 of 15 ISS Pro Evo Soccer 2 (Playstation)
My junior reporter in Leicester was a top fella - a genial Somerset bumpkin for whom no pace of life was too sedate. I like to think I taught him well, although I have noticed that as he is now himself a news editor, he does not encourage the missing of important court cases due to intense sessions of Pro Evolution. Our rivaly was such that the recruitment firm downstairs complained at the cheering and swearing - and later chair hurling - that went on. We played nearly 500 15-minute games in under a year, and documented every one. Sad but true.

11 of 15 Playstation 2
In 2001 I had secured myself a handy sideline in videogame reviewing for the website GamesDomain, but with the Dreamcast on the wane, I was faced with a diet of GBA titles in the New Year. But that was without reckoning on the staggering generosity of my bros, who had clubbed together to buy me a PS2 as well as a copy of Devil May Cry. I was touched to the brink of tears - and it was tears of laughter once we had booted up GTA3 (a present for the already PS2-owning Stuart) and beaten to death a commuter on the train platform while everything was all drug-induced slow-mo. I doubt we have ever been closer than at that moment. Stick that in your pipe Vaz!

12 of 15 Halo (Xbox)
We have all had girlfriends who either did not approve of gaming, or were sniffily indifferent. Some of you may have married one of them. The appeal of Halo – and the Xbox I bought at the same time – was as much the illicit thrill of its purchase as the fact it was a great game. It was a total impulse buy at a time when I was supposed to be saving for travelling. I hid them in my wardrobe and had to disassemble the thing every time she came round. I remained in the closet, so to speak, for six months!

13 of 15 Outrun 2 (Xbox)
One game has succeeded in taking me back to those halcyon days dahn the seafront and that is Outrun 2. Something about those incredible horizons and draw distances seemed to be inspire in my both historic reverie as well as optimism for the future. It inspired me to write my first article for Way of the Rodent and my close mate and former Raymonds Press colleague Robbo to buy an Xbox. To this day he has only bought one other game - Outrun Coast to Coast. Better than Ridge Racer 6!

14 of 15 Gears of War (360)
My girlfriend Jacqui described this game as "an epiphany" for me the other day, and if ever there was proof of her utter genius ability to understand me, that was it. It was fitting also that she should be the one who would buy it for me last Christmas. I was completely dumbstruck by the intensity, a feeling doubled by my first taste of online gaming, and over the course of three memorable days in January, it brought Stuart and I together as we played through it like two wide-eyed children booting up Match Day for the first time all those years ago.

15 of 15 Fifa 2000 (Playstation)
I could expend 10,000 words trying to explain why I play this in co-op mode on a weekly basis with Robbo. It has little to do with the game itself which at times struggles to hold its own against Match Day let alone Pro Evo - although I would modestly state at this point that we have transcended its limitations. No, it is the mythology we have weaved around the weekly escapades of Brazil 1970, drawing upon hitorical fact but embellished to a fantastical degree by all manner of characters from as far afield as Digitiser and Derby Crown Court. How they got there in there, well that is a story in itself, or rather the multitude of stories that make up a long term friendship. All I know is that it is my most treasured memory in 22 years of videogaming.