Over the past fortnight the team at Rock, Paper Shotgun has been running a series of articles on the games that shaped them called, appropriately enough, ‘Gaming Made Me’.

Last week, Kieron e-mailed a few of the collective’s friends to invite contributions on their own formative videogame experiences. Here’s what I wrote:

Your mind races to the games that you’d be proud to have made you: a revisionist history that cherry picks classics from the tree of critical consensus.

So I am Defender and Yoshi’s Island and Ocarina of Time and Symphony of the Night and Ico and Portal and all the games that top the all-time best lists; an impeccable pedigree.

But in truth you don’t get to choose the games that make you. Rather, these are the ones that time and circumstance pair you with. You don’t get to pick your DNA.

So really, I am an import copy of Smash Court Tennis 2 on the PlayStation, a game that my brother and I spent one summer playing, perched on the end of my bed in a kick-ass super-deformed doubles team, having the best time of our lives.

I am Castle of Illusion on the Megadrive, a game that I played for four hours straight one Christmas till my parents gently led me downstairs to have a break by, um, watching some TV instead. I am Centipede on the Atari XE, the insect twitch terror distracting me from any sense of not being cool or rich enough to have an ST. I am Tetris on the Gameboy, which made my 12-year-old brain spasm with joy, in much the same way it does today. I am Goldeneye on the N64 because that’s all we did for one year of university, sleeping the day, waking in the evening to laugh at the guy lumbered with the klobb.

I am the first hour of Final Fantasy VII, which I played through with my dad a few months before he left, trying desperately to get him to see what I was seeing, and catching him catching a glimpse of it. I am Dance Dance Revolution because that’s the first game I wanted to get really good at, just to see if I could. And I could.

I am Disney Think Fast on the Wii, because that’sthe game currently making my daughter and it makes her happier than anything else about this hobby, and in her joy I catch the reflection of why I do what I do.

Some of these games are good, some of them are not. That’s kind of the point of the things that make you.