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My brother and I used to love playing Atari games as kids. We were never lucky enough to have an Atari of our own but would hang out for the days we could head to our cousins' place to play Pac-Man. Even better were the evenings when our parents would take us to the local club where we were given a few 20-pence coins to play on the Atari arcade machine and bags of scampi fries (a savoury mainstay of the British pub) to entertain ourselves while they caught up with friends. I'm sure if you're a 1970s or 1980s kid you'll have some other such fond memory!

Back then, Atari was the bee's knees, a pioneer of the arcade video game and home computer market. You could say it was the ‘Apple' of the gaming world, a multimillion-dollar industry that, during its golden years, sold over 30 million consoles and hundreds of millions of games.

That was until competition intensified and a Japanese brand, Nintendo, entered the market with a big vision to expand across the globe. They originally approached Atari to work together. Negotiations began. They even got as far as drawing up final contract papers but at the very last minute Atari pulled the plug after seeing one of its main competitors demonstrating a prototype of Nintendo's game, Donkey Kong. Atari took this as a sign that Nintendo were dealing with their competitor too.

Although the issue was cleared up a month later, by then the market had changed considerably. Cheaper copycat gaming products were everywhere, the ...