Sometimes, I think I’m going a bit mad. I’ll hear something so often that I start to doubt my own memory, before I realise that, no, I was there at the time. I’m talking about the video game crash.

You’ve probably heard about it. In the 1980s, the industry imploded, and then the NES came to its rescue. After that point, it was all sunshine and roses. Oh, and something something ET for the Atari 2600.

The tiny snag is this is an abbreviated, regional, biased take at best – revisionist bullshit that has permeated the entire internet to become a kind of approved truth. And it’s not just American YouTubers – I’ll often hear British games channels wittering on about how fortunate we are that the NES rescued an industry that was otherwise effectively dead.

Again, I was there at the time. The industry in Europe was a mess – so many platforms – and yet in rude health. And that became increasingly so as we headed to the middle of the decade and beyond. Amazing programmers were performing small miracles on ludicrously underpowered hardware, increasingly trying to one-up each other. The richness of options was insane.

Yet there was barely a NES in sight. I knew precisely one person who owned one. The NES didn’t really register in the UK until the popular 8-bit machines – the ZX Spectrum, the C64, the CPC – were breathing their last. By then, the notion of the NES as an industry ‘saviour’ was absurd, because in the UK and many other countries, gaming never needed saving in the first place.