In the beginning, the games we played were tiny, chocky characters on pixelated screens with the kind of backgrounds only an active imagination could fill. The 1960s to 1990s saw the arrival of a plethora of consoles that played some of the greatest gaming classics of all time – Pong, Halls of the Things, Super Mario Bros and Space Invaders. Some of us still have our ZX Spectrums locked away in a special room where we reminisce over the frustrations of Manic Miner. Then the realms of id and Valve appeared and the first console games on TVs were overshadowed by those on monitors, and many of us pioneers in the gaming world wept with joy. Oh, the giddy delights of Doom and the dawn of the age of the FPS (first person shooter).

The console and the PC have fought for supremacy over the years and, over the past decade, the former has inched to the front, sneering at PC dinosaurs that endure relentless DRM issues and download times. Until now.