1 of 15 Sega Dreamcast
The Sega Dreamcast is special: it has soul. I love mine: I bought it because a girl I was in love with but who I didn’t like very much, realised that she didn’t really like me either and we split up and I fell into a pit for two years. I bought my Dreamcast as a place to run to: Phantasy Star Online, Jet Set Radio, Rez and Crazy Taxi gave me places where I didn’t cry or feel lonely for a bit. When I look at the machine itself – I see real people: characters of flesh and blood, I see bright, vibrant, happy places and I see optimism. I actually visualise those things from out of the plastic. No machine before or since has made my pupils dilate like the Dreamcast does – it is more real than any machine I’ve ever owned.

2 of 15 Phantasy Star Online (Dreamcast)
I’m still inside this game, and it is still inside me: my vision splits into the light and shadows of Ragol when I least expect it to: I hear echoes of PSO music in tunes everywhere and each time, I fall through the gap and back into that special place. In that Dreamcast refuge I mentioned, one dark corner would burst into life and take me home to Ragol. Like no game I’d played before, or have since, I truly believed myself to be inside my RAcast avatar. Where it went my spirit went too. To run away from my heart I’d moved to London but dark nights of PSO, connected to my hometown friends Tim and Bobi, stopped the lonely. To get a little taste of the magic, it’s not the same but then again – it ain’t far off, download the PC clone here.

3 of 15 Premier Manager (Amiga) / Championship Manager (PC)
Between the ages of 19 and 24 I was a member of the Royal Court Young Peoples’ Theatre on the Portobello Road. Of all the members I was the only one with a ‘proper’ job, a wife and a kid. Indeed, many of the group were already working as professional actors and all of the directors were absolutely working theatre pros. It was very much as if I was living two lives – one creative side and one home side. Unfortunately, in the run-up to a big production, and especially during performance weeks, the two lives would grind against each other. As luvvie as this will sound: I’m a method actor, which in short, means that I tend to live a part too deeply. Football management sims, bizarrely, became a crucial tool to help me to break out of character and to ‘return’ to my family – the relentless monotony and depth of simulation especially, were vital in pulling me back from, often, quite distressing places.

4 of 15 Command & Conquer (PC)
R.T.S. You fucking bastards. R.T.S. – the three most chilling initials ever. The ability of games such as C&C to utterly suck away entire weeks is something that still gives me the shivers. I absolutely refuse to play them now but I can’t deny their importance in my gaming life. Westwood? You cunts.

5 of 15 Binatone TV Master
Baby steps… and so it began for me in 1975? 76? An orange and silver 1970s dream it was – games in every home! I played it with my Dad for the whole half-hour it took for him to work out that videogames were stupid.
See more of the machine at the incomparably brilliant www.old-computers.com

6 of 15 Half Life 2 (PC)
Sod Project Zero 360 (or whatever the fuck it’s called) – this is Next Gen: stories that convince, are compelling and that can make you feel fear, desperation, panic and relief. Half Life 1 was the first FPS I ever bothered to finish: Half-Life 2 is a whole new home and I feel not that I finished the game but that I’ve taken just one excursion to a real place, a geography, world and ‘light’ that I can visit again any time I want to.

7 of 15 Tetris (Work PC)
I’m lucky enough to remember working in an office before we had PCs. Somehow that makes me glad because it helps put a perspective on my work environment today. Then, the PCs arrived and along with them came a network-distributed Tetris clone. And every single damn last one of us traded all our brand-new working efficiencies for ten times the time playing Tetris. I would play for so long that my brain would dance hallucinations around my peripheral vision: generally turning the offices into a massive pro-Tetris tournament – one in which I was a king warrior. Tetris is a great analogue for work: long, boring and then stressful and ultimately: pointless.

8 of 15 Advance Wars (GameboyAdvance)
Before Advance Wars no bum piles for me. After? The old farmers are a constant arse-related shadow. Even more so than Tetris, this little fucker forced me to play – to play when I absolutely had better things to do. Jesus, I would even sneak the thing into the bog and play when my girlfriend was naked in the next room and fighting off her working fatigue, so she could fuck me before sleep took her away. Despite that fantastic time-limited alternative, some poorly-animated cute comedy-killer would call me into just one-more-battle.

9 of 15 Matrix (Commodore Vic-20)
Arcades actually scared me a bit. I never got good enough at Spacies, Asteroids or Galaxians: my lack of mastery made the big, serious, cabinets even more daunting. The Commodore Vic-20 however—when Frazer Edmondson’s Mum wasn’t using it for cataloguing recipes—was a million times more accessible and silly and fun. Matrix was the first title that convincingly had me seeing the future and understanding that videogames might be an important part of the rest of my whole life. Perhaps it was Minter’s character and spirit that transformed pixels into soul? Whatever the reason, Matrix showed me that what was to come was worth being a part of.

10 of 15 Virtua Tennis (Dreamcast)
No need to explain the controls, no need to talk through the game mechanics, no need to introduce the sport – hand your missus a controller and she will be spanking your sorry arse within minutes. Four players, drinks, sweets and a laugh – that’s what Virtua Tennis is. It is perfect.

11 of 15 Gunpey (WonderSwan)
I likes a bit of minimalism: the simplicity that creates perfect conditions for the ingress of a different state of consciousness. Oooh, I love clean lines, clear instructions and simple objectives too. Gunpey takes that dynamic, mixes in a bit of the Tetris mechanic and throws simplistic complexity into a tiny monochrome screen and tells you to solve things. And to keep solving until you collapse. Of the entire handheld collection here, which includes PSP, DS and GBA, my eight year old daughter chooses the purity of Gunpey every time. She’s not wrong.

12 of 15 Scramble Cocktail
I was never very good at the early arcade machines – in fact I never even saw the likes of Tempest, Robotron, Joust or Star Wars back in the day. But every Cotswolds pub my Dad took us to had a cocktail Scramble in amongst the crisps, red flock seats and horse-brasses. Giving me a stack of 10p coins was a sure-fire way for Dad to keep me quiet while he drunk bitter ale with his pals, or while we waited for the delivery of a basket meal. I got pretty good but never had anyone to show my skills to. Dad would even join in a game sometimes: if I showed him a Scramble table today he wouldn’t have a clue what it was. That makes me sad but I can’t quite fathom why.

13 of 15 Ikari Warriors (Amstrad CPC-464)
Fuck me but the Amstrad CPC-464 was a soulless squared-off hunk of circuits. Clearly designed by a colour-blind playground accountant it was, however, really very capable. The French loved them, and when have they ever got anything wrong? Whatever – the Amstrad, care of angry Uncle Alan Sugar, provided me with my early teenage bedroom computing. I didn’t really have that many games for it – I preferred going down the other side of the village and playing on Mark Rayson’s Commodore 64. His Mum always brought us snacks and drinks and Mark himself could cook a mean curried bean toastie. So anyway, Ikari Warriors: nobody else had it, the Amstrad version really did kick arse and playing the game for hours and hours felt like a special, and unique, guilty secret.

14 of 15 Xevious (Nintendo Entertainment System)
Diddle, diddle, diddle, diddle – easily the least imaginative game sound effects ever but absolutely perfect as a soundtrack to evenings before TV got good. My then wife and I had recently had our first baby together and once Rosy was in bed we would both be too tired to do very much but too happy-stressed to sleep either. Janet never really liked videogames but for some reason she loved me playing Xevious. She would even have a go at the controls herself from time-to-time. She would be genuinely thrilled when I’d get further into a level and never impatient at my constant re-starts. We lived in a rented house with old orange carpets and we had a hand-me-down sofa and a cheap telly from work – and we would huddle together on the rug lit only by the glow of screen phosphor and warmed by baggy jumpers and early love and we would play Xevious. I miss both of the people we were so very badly. You can’t go back.

15 of 15 Grim Fandango (PC)
Janet and I played this together as well …and I miss Manny Calavera and Mercedes Colomar too. The Number Nine Express departs and you really can’t go back.