1 of 15 Space Invaders ( Arcade)
Sure, I’d played videogames before Space Invaders, but nothing had ever grabbed me by my prepubescent balls as thoroughly as this game did. Poor old Spacies is still, for me, the definitive arcade videogaming experience.

2 of 15 Donkey Kong (Game & Watch)
Long story, but Australia haunted my dreams throughout my childhood. When I finally get to visit in 1981, all I do for four weeks is sit inside and play on the Donkey Kong I’d spent my entire holiday allowance on in Singapore. Worth every minute.

3 of 15 Sharp MZ80A
My rich cousins were the lucky recipients of this, one of the most expensive and most useless home computers of the early eighties. Thing came with half a dozen games on tape – most written in BASIC – and that was pretty much all she wrote. Nevertheless I spent every minute I could on the machine and took my first faltering steps towards my coding career trying to write ‘rude word hangman’.

4 of 15 Penetrator (Spectrum)
My cousins fault again – or, at least, one of their neighbours. Playing what seemed to be a perfect version of Scramble (or close enough at least) on a 4” camping TV with a Spectrum plugged into it seemed almost too good to be true. I knew then that I had to have one of these machines. And indeed I did. Kept me faithfully occupied throughout secondary school and well into my early twenties.

5 of 15 1942/R-Type/Commando ( Arcade)
You may be wondering where all the arcade games are in this list? Well, my opportunities for arcade gaming were rather limited during my adolescence – consisting as they did of being occasionally scared (or should that be scarred) by Defender at the ice-skating rink and these three – which were the resident games (with an honourable mention to Super Hang-On) at my little gangs choice of drinking establishments in Watford Town Centre.

6 of 15 Planetfall (PC)
My first job after school was as a ‘Microdevelopment’ programmer – basically writing dBase applications on XT PCs. This was pretty much the first time I’d ever worked on serious computers and I was overjoyed to find a healthy videogaming sub-culture in place. We used to play through all of the Infocom games as a team at lunchtimes, four of us clustered around one monitor trying to find solutions to increasingly bizarre problems. I loved all of those Infocom adventures, but it’s Planetfall that I remember most fondly. If you don’t know why, then I can only suggest you download and play if for yourself.

7 of 15 Leisure Suit Larry (PC)
With the arrival of the EGA graphics card came a new thrill for office gaming – a pirated version of Leisure Suit Larry (rumoured to be infected with some nasty ‘virus’ thing). Obviously the Amiga’s and Atari ST’s had been showing off their fancy colour graphics for ages before then, but seeing the boring IBM AT PC’s at work showing more than Cyan and Magenta was a revelation. Sure, the game was to be eclipsed by pretty much every other graphical adventure known to mankind in the years to come, but this is where my love affair with a genre started.

8 of 15 Civilisation (PC)
Christ. I get shivers just thinking about this game. I have spent more hours playing this game in it’s various iterations than pretty much anything else. You will pry my copy of Civ from my cold dead hands.

9 of 15 NHL Hockey/Sonic (Megadrive)
It’s weird my gaming life. As a kid I always coveted consoles from afar – we were never in the financial bracket that would allow me access to games at £40 a go – and, as an young adult, I always found it difficult to justify buying a machine just to play videogames. Spending £1500 on a 386 PC was acceptable, but somehow spending £200 on a machine for under the telly just didn’t seem right.Until I borrowed a mates megadrive and a handful of games for a couple of months. I never did buy myself a megadrive, but it opened the door to me thinking that having a dedicated machine for playing videogames would be a good idea.

10 of 15 Space Invaders (Arcade)
Yes again. More accurately, a Taito Space Invaders cocktail arcade cab. Even more accurately, my Taito Space Invaders cocktail arcade cab. Despite being in rather rough condition and frequently not-working (it’s got a dead monitor at the time of writing) I love this machine to pieces. I love this machine as much for the hours of harmless tinkering required to keep it going as I do for the many more hours of fun I’ve had rediscovering arcade classics that the instant hit of MAME just doesn’t provide.

11 of 15 Card Fighters Clash (NGPC)
I’d long wanted a portable gaming machine, something to play on the tube or on the sofa, but nothing had ever been quite right. The Lynx was too big, Gameboy was too black & white and the PC Engine was too expensive. I wavered about getting a Game Gear for a bit, but in the end decided to spend my money on records or beer or something.The Neo Geo Pocket arrived at just the right time, was just the right size and had just the right specs. I picked one up on release along with three or four games – including Card Fighters Clash. Playing what amounts to a collectable card game based around characters from SNK & Capcom fighting games seems almost laughable, but this game just works. Magical.

12 of 15 Vectrex
The fruit of my Ebay labours. Having managed to survive without any videogame consoles at all for over 30 years I managed, over the course of two or three years to acquire about 20 of the bloody things, ranging from a Magnavox Odyssey all the way up to the Sega Dreamcast and most points in between. The Vectrex was, and is, my favourite of the lot. There is something timeless and wondrous about seeing those stark white lines pulsing across the Vector monitor.

13 of 15 Robotron ( Arcade)
I was a late convert to the joys of Robotron. The first time that I (knowingly at least) saw a machine was at a UKVAC meet where I was utterly intimidated by the skills on display and chose to spend my time with Libble Rabble (a game which narrowly misses out on being on this list) instead. Some time later I had an opportunity to buy an upright UK cab and quite literally jumped at the chance.

14 of 15 Super Monkey Ball (Gamecube)
Up and until this point – about two years ago now – I had never owned a current gaming machine (other than handhelds and various PCs). All of the consoles and computers I owned were out of production - although you could stretch a point by way of the Dreamcast which was just eking out the last of it’s shelf life when I bought one on Ebay.The announcement of Unity was the trigger which caused me to topple over the edge into full on videogame whore. Unity never happened of course, but that doesn’t matter – the Game Cube (and the PS2 and Xbox which eventually joined it) has given me more than enough moments of videogaming excellence over the last couple of years, epitomised for me by the sublime Super Monkey Ball which crawled under my skin so effectively that I’m considering buying it again now for the Xbox just so that I don’t have to worry about whether I prefer SMB1 or SMB2.

15 of 15 Project Gotham Racing 3 (Xbox360)
And so we come right up to date.
Last week I placed a preorder for an Xbox 360 and a copy of PGR3 (as much for the new iteration of Geometry Wars as for any other reason). I’ve preordered games before (mostly on import) but never a videogaming system. My videogaming journey, having gone forward, backwards and sideways over the last 25 years, is complete.