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I do not have a clear memory of the first time I opened my Nintendo DS. Like all of the new toys, electronics, and game consoles that I received as a child, my DS must have been a gift. My Nintendo DS was the Lite version, coral pink, with a small, stubby stylus to match the matte blush on the inside of the machine.

This was well before the time of cellphone graveyards, where aging iPhones would begin to clutter kitchen drawers and empty shoe boxes. I had been using...

Nintendo holds a huge place in gaming history, but there’s a roughly two decade window where they were simply on fire. In the Eighties, the Nes and Game Boy resurrected the home gaming and handheld markets; in the Nineties, they waged a console war with Sega and won. But by the turn of the millennium, Nintendo had begun to lose steam, outsold by Sony’s PlayStation and approaching the 2000s with a bloodied nose.

The gap grew worse with the launch of PlayStation 2 in 2000, with Sony wriggling their way...

You don’t need to look far to see that gaming is everywhere with film versions of Tetris, Super Mario Bros and Dungeons & Dragons in cinemas this week. Chanté talks to Rhianna Pratchett, video game writer on Tomb Raider, Timi and Joey from The Nerd Council podcast and the Guardian’s video games editor Keza MacDonald about why it is dominating

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