Blimey. It's astonishing what you forget.

The genius that is Jason Robertson - teletext's answer to Indiana Jones, only spunkier - has been digging through dusty VHS tapes once again, seeking to retrieve old teletext data.

Now cram this down your neck-vent: he has managed to salvage the tenth ever edition of Digitiser, from January 1993. To date, this is the earliest surviving edition of Digitiser to have been retrieved in full. Yes, the very first edition is available as a video on YouTube, but never before has the clean data for a Digi from that era ever been retrieved.

And thus, behold: the first Digitiser index page design in all its glory; I recall our editor asking what the "DIGITISING" text was all about. I couldn't give an adequate answer, other than I thought it was cool.

And note that we were still trailing the "Mind Games" section - featuring Chess and Bridge - which our editor had wanted to make Digitiser a part of. That could've been... interesting. I'm very glad that this was a fight we dug in over, and won.

What's really odd, is that we evidently weren't doing tips at this point, and there were three reviews - including a "Game of the Week", an arcade review, and a PC game review. I have absolutely no recollection of this particular layout for the section, nor that we weren't covering tips from the very beginning. And why we broke up the reviews with the letters page sandwiched between them is anybody's guess.

But anyway. Let's take a look at the rest shall we? You might like to compare and contrast this edition with the brand-new classic-style Digi I put together last week....

Huge thanks on behalf of us and Jason to @amylrob1863 for supplying the tape upon which this important historical artefact was sprawled.

I've been slightly dreading this day; the day when Digitiser2000 went back to normal after a week of classic Digi. When it was met with howls of disappointment, and scores of you heading for the bar.

Most of you probably know I'm a big fan of the much-derided band Marillion. I make no apologies. Your opinion is wrong. ​I became a fan when I was 13 or 14; they got me at that sweet spot when I was still malleable, and their music became part of me. But then something happened; Fish, the charismatic, towering, lead singer, left the band and was replaced by a tiny heartthrob called Steve Hogarth. Marillion became an entirely different band.

I'd argue that they became a better band.... but it wasn't the same band as the one that had hit me at that formative point.

Gradually, as Hogarth became more established as the lead singer of Marillion - and, frankly, the band wrote better music with him - they played less and less of the old, Fish-era tracks when I saw them live. They didn't need to. Why play, I dunno, the clunky and soporific Chelsea Monday - just because it's old - when you could play something new and better - and more representative of where the band are at as human beings - like, say, White Paper?

And then, a few years ago, those old, Fish-era, tracks started creeping back into the setlist, the band having proven themselves without Fish, having succeeded in maintaining a successful career, and clearly having come to terms with their past. Suffice to say, when they played Market Square Heroes - their debut single - for the first time in years, I was pretty euphoric. It felt special. It was a callback to being a kid again, and besides - much as it pains me to say it - Marillion perform those old songs better than Fish does these days.

Since then, I think I've heard Market Square Heroes at almost all of the Marillion gigs I've been to in the past few years, and, well, the edge has been taken off that euphoria. Just a little.

Doing classic Digitiser last week, I felt like Hogarth must've felt those times he played a Fish-era song in his early days with the band - being met with applause and cheers, knowing it'd be followed by one of his own tracks. Cue polite applause, which you can't be sure isn't just being delivered out of pity because you don't want him to feel bad about how much more you enjoyed the Fish song...

The first year of Digitiser was bewildering in a lot of ways. We'd been isolated in our blissful little bubble for months, and been lulled into thinking that it would continue thus forever.

Teletext launched on January 1st 1993, and from the off it was clear that what we did and wrote on Digi could have ramifications on a national scale. Upsetting Amiga owners was the first indication of that reach.

Though we'd never explicitly stated that we wouldn't be covering the Amiga, we had - from day one - made it clear that our focus would be consoles, arcade games, and the PC.

Partly, this was because it was pretty apparent to anybody with a third of a brain that consoles were the future of gaming. Emap's Computer & Video Games had spun off into Mean Machines, and the latter magazine felt more exciting, due to its exclusive focus on console gaming. While we were demoing Digi, in the months leading up to Teletext's launch, Mean Machines itself had split into two - Mean Machines Sega and the officially-endorsed Nintendo Magazine System. A month later, Sega released Sonic the Hedgehog 2, and the media coverage had been unprecedented for a console game.

The Amiga had been around, one way or another, since 1985. The Amiga 500+ and Amiga 600 had been released in early 1992, and the Amiga 1200 towards the end of that year, but in terms of home computing, its rival the Atari ST was all but dead, and the PC was fast becoming the home computer of choice. Sales of the Amiga were declining, and there were fewer games being released for it.

The only people who still believed it had a future were Amiga owners - even if there was a sense that they were fooling themselves, like half-drowned passengers of the Titanic thinking that flapping their arms around and blowing a whistle would somehow prevent them from freezing to death.

To everyone else, the Amiga felt like the past, and - while teletext might not have been the most current medium - we at least wanted to try and capture the zeitgeist.

More pertinently, there was a bigger reason why we never reviewed Amiga games...

I started work at Teletext Ltd in the middle of September 1992 - over 25 years ago now. By December 1992, Digitiser already existed, although nobody outside of Teletext was getting to see it.

I remember the first moment I was introduced to Tim Moore; smart shirt, braces, long hair, loads of earrings. Our features editor once described him as "Teletext's style guru". He was trendy and I wasn't. He was a bit posh, and I wasn't. He was cool, and I wasn't. He was well educated, and I wasn't. I'd been a teenage dad, and he hadn't.

Initially, I found him a bit stand-offish, if I'm honest. I was only 21, and Tim was quite a bit older than me. I wanted him to like me, not least because we'd been forced together to write the new Teletext video games section that I'd proposed.  

On paper, we shouldn't have been mates, but we shared a compatible sense of humour, a similar outlook on life, and it's probably fair to say that neither of us were terribly well-suited to the structure of office work. Neither of us were particularly ambitious either I don't think; we just wanted to enjoy what we were doing.

At some point in those first couple of months at Teletext I started to consider Tim a mate. Though he wasn't as avid a gamer as I had been, I know he shared my feeling that we were incredibly lucky to have landed a job writing about games. We both really appreciated our good fortune.

In some respects, we were the worst possible combination of people. In all other respects... without Tim and I working together, Digitiser would never have happened in the way that it did.

I've not shied away from talking about feelings on here. I've always been a sort of heart-on-my-sleeve sort of a person anyway, and that has only increased as I've become older, and care less what other people think. 

I don't think emotions are anything to be embarrassed about (embarrassment being, in itself, an emotional response - ya dingus).

​We all have the same emotional ingredients. We have good days and bad days. Points of strength and weakness. I think one of the greatest sins of our society is that most of us don't share what we're feeling with one another. We're expected to be strong. "Boys don't cry", and all that.

​ "Ooh... you know your problem? You're too sensitive", or "That's all a bit touchy-feely", said with a sneer.

If we were all a little more open - and society valued our emotions as much as our practical or academic achievements - the world would be a much nicer place. 

Yet feelings aren't for nothing. They serve an evolutionary purpose. Fear and anger and love are survival tools. And if you don't believe that... there are even physiological consequences of feelings, which also have practical applications.

Sonic the Hedgehog will always be inextricably linked with Digitiser, in my mind. The first event Mr Hairs and I ever attended was the launch of Sonic 2, at Hamleys toy store in London.

On our first day on air, following the index page, the first thing on the first page of the first section was a large graphic of Sonic - an attempt to assure readers that we could be every bit as visual as print mags.

And then, of course, we upset an enormous number of Sega fans because we dared to give Sonic 3 a mere 72% score - at a time when all major releases were all supposed to receive a minimum of 90%, by law.

I even stole liberally from Doctor Robotnik when it came to finding an antagonist for Turner The Worm, the teletext cartoon strip what I wrote and drew.

By the time I stumbled into Digitiser, I was already a fan of the 'hog. I couldn't afford the game when it first came out - on this very day, 25 years ago - but I'd read about it. I'd seen the screenshots. I had a friend who'd seen it running on a stall at Wembley Market, and pumped him so hard for information that he suffered a collapsed bowel.

​I kept asking whether it really was as good-looking as it had been in the magazines. And get a load of this information: it actually was.

So. Euro 2016 then. <KICKS OFF A COD-REGGAE BEAT>

"I don't like football. Oh no. I love it!"

Except: I don't.

I'm merely ambivalent to football. I've no interest in it, outside of the World Cup. And even then I mostly feign interest just to feel normal. I get loving something, the euphoria, the chance to let off steam by screaming abuse at people. I just don't get why it would ever be football.

Please don't misunderstand: I don't judge you for liking it. I tried to like it myself when I was younger. All the men in my family are seriously into their football (these days, even one of my nieces plays for West Ham's youth team).

I mean, it's such a brilliant tool for conversation when you don't have much else in common with someone, be they taxi drivers, waiters, or cousins. And I'm envious of those who can do the football talk. But I've tried, and failed, to actually like it.

I collected the Panini Stickers. I used to have a Watford FC kit and scarf. I went to see them play half a dozen or so times... but it bored me so much. So very, very much.

I was in my local Waterstones the other day. Like most people, I went in there to take photos of books that I could later download onto my Kindle.

There was a sort of bargain bin/table full of dog-eared and soiled stock, and on top of the pile was a tatty copy of a Doctor Who tabletop role-playing game. I wasn't surprised that they were effectively chucking it out - what modern kid would ever want that? - but I was taken aback that there had even been a role-playing game released at any point in the last 15 years.

I mean, I know that Warhammer 40k is still a thing. Games Workshop isn't what it was, but there's the odd store still open on the occasional high street, usually with a bunch of 14 year-olds sat in a dingy backroom with a grown man, who probably hasn't even had a CRB check.

But the golden age of the tabletop role-playing game is long gone, the power of the mind's eye superseded by the power of the graphics processor. 

The first time I ever saw Super Mario 64 I was in the Fulham headquarters of Sega Europe.

Obviously, I knew of it. Everyone did. Those screenshots we'd all seen in the mags looked too good to be true. 

We'd gone for one of our meetings with the company's then head of public relations, Mark Maslowicz. Tim and I had a weird relationship with Mark; we really liked him, yet there was something about him which inspired us to wind him up.

As I may have previously stated, on one occasion we waited until he left his office, then drew a large penis mid-way through a notepad that was on his desk. ​Another time, when we overheard a conversation which revealed the pack-in game for the 32X, and enjoyed playing on his paranoia, making him think we had a mole working for us in his department.