Football, like everything else important in life, is about stories. People implant themselves into the narrative: where they were when they saw Maradona's handball, the strangers they hugged when Ole Gunnar Solskjær scored that historic last-minute winner at the 1999 Champions League final. No doubt new tales are already being conjured around Jude Bellingham's scissor kick against Slovakia in the dying seconds of Sunday's Euro 24 match. Sport is a nostalgia machine – and this is as true for video game simulations as it is for the real thing. Every gamer has their favourite footie sim, but for me, and many other players of my … ahem, vintage … it was Pro Evolution Soccer, numbers 3 to 6. This was the early 2000s, the age of the PlayStation 2. I was a writer for hire at Future Publishing, basically hanging out at its office in Bath, working mostly on the Official PlayStation magazine.

The Tokyo Olympics opening kicked off early this morning, and the parade of nations, where athletes walk through Japan's Olympic stadium, had a Japanese twist. A medley of videogame music, orchestrated, formed the soundtrack for the parade. It all kicked off with the main theme from Dragon Quest -- which sounds pretty Olympian outright -- followed by hits from Final Fantasy, Monster Hunter, Nier, Sonic, Chrono Trigger and, er, eFootball. There are some notable omissions -- no Nintendo songs (Pokemon? Zelda?) being the biggest one -- but some Street Fighter II songs might have fitted well into the competitive theme.