My mate Steve still owes me twenty quid from a bet we made in 1997. The wager? Whether anyone would ever top GoldenEye 007's four-player split-screen battles. He reckoned Quake II would murder it within six months. Poor sod's been dodging that debt for twenty-seven years now, and…

Standing in front of that burgundy CRT television in 1996, watching Mario's pixelated face stretch and scrunch in the file select screen, I had no idea I was witnessing the birth of something that would fundamentally rewire how we think about moving through digital space. My mum was…

I've got this theory that the best cooperative games aren't the ones where you're constantly in sync, performing some beautiful ballet of coordinated moves. No, the really memorable ones are where you're both slightly out of step, bumping into each other, accidentally ruining each other's stealth approaches, and…

I've been staring at this thing for twenty minutes, and I still can't decide if it's brilliant or lazy. The Sega Genesis Game Flashback Collection sits on my coffee table like a time capsule wrapped in modern plastic – forty-two games crammed into a unit that's roughly the…