Here are ten things that everybody who played games in the 1980s will never forget.
"Pixels! Gertcha little blocks here-ah!" he would bellow from his cab, before marching up your path, and pouring a sack of fresh pixels over your back gate.
We now know that the Thatcher government closed down most pixel mines in the early-90s - leading to the collapse of the 8-bit mining industry - and pixels became increasingly rare in video games. It's only relatively recently - with the development of controversial pixelfracking - that we've seen pixels returning to games.
"Yaarrrrr! It be Chuckie Egg you're looking for, you scurvy dog!" he'd growl, while dispatching his bosun to fetch us a bootleg copy. "Cross my palm with doubloons and we'll say no more. Yarrrrr!"
Of course, pirates now exist only online, after they were driven underground by the crusading agents of the Federation Against Software Theft, in their anti-piracy frigates. Towards the end of the decade, we'd often lie awake at night hearing the cannons of the F.A.S.T. ships firing, knowing that the golden age of piracy was drawing to a close...
The size of them gradually came down over the course of the decade, but the first home computer tapes were roughly the dimensions of the average family car, and needed a cassette deck the size of a garden shed! If you had a particularly large collection of games, there was barely any space in your bedroom to sleep in!
With nothing else to do, we switched on the TV - perhaps to watch an episode of Dogtanian, or Morph - to find news reports on every channel, talking about how Miner Willy had taken industrial action, demanding better conditions, and more lives.
We were too young to understand what it was all about - Dad kept complaining about "The bloody unions bringing this country to its knees" . We just know that things went from bad to worse when other games characters went on sympathy strike in solidarity: Wally Week, Sabreman, Daley Thompson, Horace. Only that filthy scab Dizzy kept working.
Exactly 13 years previously, on September 29th 1987, everyone, wherever they were, turned to the person nearest to them and remarked: "On this day 13 years hence, Sony shall release a smaller, redesigned version of its first home console, and it shall be called the PSOne. We must never forget this day."
And to this day we haven't!
One of the teachers would usually be dispatched to chase him away - but not before he'd led them a merry dance, running in circles, panting, wagging his ZX81, and peeing up a bench.
From that point, it was entirely up to you whether to continue onwards. "10 START COLD WAR/20 PRINT 'PENIS'/20 GOTO TEN".
Suffice to say, once news of the discovery had spread around the world, it convinced many parents to buy home computers for their kids, so that they too could use them to prove they had bums. Of course, most of us just used them for playing games!
It was hidden as an Easter Egg - if the player lost three fights in a row without landing a single blow on their opponent, then pressed T, Y and SHIFT at the same time, they would be transported to a remote cemetery where Bronk was being laid to rest.
Sadly, despite being the first recorded Bronk's Funeral, there were no clues as to his (or her) identity - and the programmers have denied all knowledge of including it in their game. The mystery continues!
10 THINGS EVERY NINETIES GAMER REMEMBERS
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HERE ARE 10 VITAL THINGS EVERY GAMER SHOULD KNOW ABOUT THEIR CONSUMER RIGHTS... BUT FOR SOME REASON WE'VE PLACED THEM IN A GALLERY OF CHILDREN WITH DISGUSTING SNOT BUBBLES, WHICH IN RETROSPECT MIGHT'VE BEEN A MISTAKE