My first real experience of video gaming came early in my life when my dad treated us all to an Acorn Electron. My dad was always a sucker for a piece of new technology, and the beige beauty had caught his eye a few weeks before at a friend’s house.  His motivation to buy one for the Johnson household was steeled upon the realisation that said friend had a vast library of games which we could purloin through the ingenious invention known as the tape-to-tape cassette recorder.

Thus began my journey through the world of video games. My father had chosen the path and I would stick to it diligently from that day forth. The mainstream wasn’t for me; Johnny Popular could keep his Spectrum, his Commodore 64, the Elk was for me. Further down the road I would shun the Amiga in favour of the Atari ST, turn my back on the Playstation and fling my arms wide open for Nintendo’s 64-bit beauty. Playstation 2? Pah! I’ll have a Dreamcast please!

My friends would always be looking down on me, but I was impervious to their jibes and taunts. Aside the occasional lapse (there were a few exclusives I would secretly covet, but they will wait for a future post), I was more than happy with my lot.

What follows is a potted tour through my gaming past. Each post will be a chronological record of systems owned and the games I most enjoyed on that platform. First up: the Acorn Electron. [...]