For one night only, Digitiser The Show will be coming to you live - on stage! An evening of comedy, gaming, and utter nonsense, full of games, skits, special guests,and old hardware, you'll not want to miss it. And if you do miss it - you'll kick yourself... IN THE FACE.

This extravaganza will take place on Saturday 20th of July at 7pm(doors open at 6.30pm prompt), at the Elliott Hall, Harrow Arts Centre, Hatch End, Harrow, HA5 4EA www.harrowartscentre.com

Spaces are strictly limited!

CLICK HERE FOR TICKETS. 

Every story has a beginning...

Do you remember when the first trailer for The Phantom Menace came out, and we all got really excited about that srapline, and then Darth Vader turned out to be a annoying little kid with a bowl haircut who couldn't act, and said stuff like "Mom, you said that the biggest problem in the universe is no one helps each other"? 

​Yeah, that was disappointing wasn't it? Not least given that in the very next film he murdered some indigenous children, and then some more kids in the film after that, and then choked his wife.

That's literally like doing a sequel to, I dunno, Pinocchio where a grown-up Pinocchio deliberately tells a lie so that his nose shoots through the eye socket of a Somalian orphan, and then another sequel where he bites his wife's thumb off and sends cuttings of his pubic hair to celebrities.

But anyway. It's not just intergalactic, child-murdering, super villains who had a less-than-venerable origin story. Here are ten huge games companies, and the games they started with. 

Biffo, Gannon and Larry Bundy Jr get stuck into everything they hate about the way video games are often depicted on the big screen. And then deviate, inevitably, into discussions about theme parks and dinosaurs.

Bosses, eh? What's that Peter Principle thing they say about bosses? That everyone is promoted to their level of incompetence, so that - in time - every position in an organisation will be occupied by somebody who is too incompetent to fulfil the role?

I sort of get it.

But also... it's one of those concepts I have an issue with. I think it's only partially true. I mean, I've had plenty of bad bosses, who seemed completely out of their depth, but also some good bosses. Though, also, I suppose, everyone has their own definition of a good and bad boss. Some people need a boss who micromanages. I prefer one who trusts my ability to get something done, hates meetings, and lets me go home at 3pm. 

Back when I had "proper" jobs, I displayed such a wilful lack of ambition, such utter disrespect for authority and disdain for anyone with a thirst for promotion, that I was only once promoted to any sort of management position, more or less by accident. 

I hated it. I hated the responsibility. I hated the sense that I was somehow implicitly better than some people I worked with. I hated having to tell people when they weren't doing their job properly. 

In fact, around that time I had an anxiety dream about disciplining one of the two members of staff I was responsible for, in which I recommended to my line manager that we should "Throw him out by the rear skin flap".

I don't know what that meant, but my sleeping brain found it so funny that I woke myself up by laughing. Which pretty much sums up my entire career.

Anyway, get this: I'm going to look really smart and clever now, because I've realised that The Peter Principle also applies to another type of boss: the video game boss.

Wha... wha... whaaaaaaa?!?

Mini versions of the SNES, NES, Commodore 64 and PlayStation have been hot commodities in recent Christmases - with a Sega Mega Drive/Genesis mini on the way. However, retro gaming collectors aren't too keen on them.

​Fortunately, Biffo and Gannon are here to tell you why every opinion you have about these dinky classic machines is wrong!

The Bitmap Brothers were among the first "rock star" games developers - an image they chose to cultivate, with photographs of them in sunglasses and denim jackets, fannying around next to helicopters.

From 1988 to 2001 they released a string of diverse games - from the arcade shooting of Xenon and Xenon 2 to the futuristic sports of the Speedball series - becoming best known for their distinct visual style... which was all sort chunky and shiny, with no deep blacks... Look, I know that's a terrible description of it, but you try coming up with something better. 

Truthfully... I loved what The Bitmaps' games looked like, but always found them a bit wanting in the gameplay department. They were too tough, too fiddly; often a case of style over substance. Still, you know what people are like; they just want good looking games that have been made by some men in sunglasses who fanny around near helicopters, pretending to be cool.

And here we are in 2019; one of The Bitmaps' most heralded Amiga/ST games - Gods - is back to be reevaluated in the harsh, unflattering, light of the 21st Century. 

See no "Harris" fear no "Harris"...!

It's weird how your memory plays tricks. A couple of years ago my dad and I drove past what I'd always believed had been my aunt and uncle's old home.

I mentioned this to my dad, asking him when it was that they'd moved out, and he didn't know what I was talking about. I was taken aback; I'd had the most vivid memory of being in that house - it has a very distinct red front door (actually a side-door)... but... no. Apparently my aunt and uncle had never lived there, nobody we knew ever lived there, yet somehow I remember walking through that red front door... I remember the layout inside... but - according to both my parents - I've never been inside. 

Reincarnation? Uh.... Based upon experience elsewhere, it's more likely my mind had basically done its own thing, irrespective of reality. 

I mean, take the Nintendo 64. I've got two sort of conflicting, incompatible, memories - actually, more like feelings - about it.

The first of these is that I enjoyed a lot of games on the N64; Super Mario 64, Goldeneye, Ocarina of Time, Waverace 64... The other memory is that I didn't like the N64, that it's my least-favourite Nintendo console, that the joypad was horrible, and the graphics blurry and indistinct. I had this belief challenged recently when I went back to have a crack Mario Kart 64 on the original hardware, and was rendered aghast by how well it played.

It gets weirder still; I never played Turok: Dinosaur Hunter. And also... I definitely did play Turok: Dinosaur Hunter.

The former is a conviction that I've held onto for the past 22 years. I remember the reviews generally praising it, while criticising the fog/limited draw distance which shrouded its levels... but was pretty certain I never had any first-hand memory of all that.

And yet... I must've done, because I've been playing this re-release of Turok: Dinosaur Hunter on the Switch, and I'm having all these Manchurian candidate-style flashbacks to the first time I must've played it. So... I dunno.

​Conclusion: brains are idiots, and you should never trust the veracity of anything anybody ever says.

You may think you know the conspiracy theory about Saddam Hussein stockpiling PlayStation 2s... but the truth is even stranger. Digitiser presents a story of PlayStations, supercomputers and World War 3... 

Biffo, Gannon, Larry Bundy Jr and Octav1us attempt to ask some of our Patreon backers' most pressing questions - such which gaming world we would most like to live in, how to properly pronounce Hyrule, our plans for Digitiser Series 2, and what we would change about our YouTube careers. Please be aware: contains frank discussion about mental health.

You want some heresy? I'll give you heresy! I'll shove that heresy right down your fat, greasy, neck: Yoshi's Island was considerably better than Super Mario World. 

Despite being subtitled Super Mario World 2. it somehow never gets the recognition I truly believe it deserves. It remains the Super NES game I've played more than any other in the years since; the one I always return to. 

See, Super Mario World, brilliant as it was, lacked Yoshi's Island's gorgeous, hand-drawn, visuals, as well as its sheer weight of ideas. Most single stages in Yoshi would introduce a gameplay element which entire other games would've been based around, before throwing it aside and moving on. 

​And talking of throwing... what's the deal with Yoshi and the eggs? He eats enemies, and then lays an egg, and then uses the eggs as projectile weapons? What's the deal with that? Is there another animal in nature that uses its own reproductive system as a form of defence?

Do hens kick their eggs into the faces of foxes, or try to smother them with their cloaca? Do frogs drown predators in their own frogspawn? Do marsupials stick their wet young onto their fists, and use them as makeshift boxing gloves?

I appreciate that I may be overthinking this.