A few years ago I bought a Japanese copy of Snatcher, a cyberpunk video game designed by Hideo Kojima before he went on to create the legendary Metal Gear Solid series. There were just two problems with this purchase: the game is a text-heavy role-playing adventure with no English translation, and I don't own a PC Engine, a cult 16 bit machine first released in Japan in 1987, which hosted some of the finest arcade conversions of the era in then-astounding visual quality. A small number were imported into the UK, but it was never a huge hit here, so getting one on eBay is a costly and risk-laden adventure. I bought Snatcher because I loved its anime aesthetic and its role in the nascent career of a games industry legend. Last week, I loaded it up for the first ever time, thanks to the Analogue Duo.

There's a good chance you've never played one, much less seen one, but the PC Engine--branded in the US as the TurboGrafx-16--is a game console that arrived at a unique moment in gaming history. A bona-fide Nintendo-threatening hit in its home country of Japan when it launched there in the late 1980s, this system from computer maker NEC and game company Hudson Soft (makers of Bomberman) could have changed the gaming landscape. But in the US, the console was quickly overshadowed by the Sega Genesis, which launched around the same time. Thankfully, all those long-neglected PC Engine and TurboGrafx-16 games are being given another chance. Since finally launching its first handheld system, hardware maker Analogue is taking a crack at the PC Engine, giving its software a home suitable for the 21st century.

There is no single objective history of video games. There are certainly elements we can all agree on – the order in which home computers and consoles were launched, the general sweep of technology, from blocky monochrome sprites to vast realistic landscapes – but everyone who plays games holds within them a completely different version of events, based on the machines they owned and the games they loved. My own history started with arcade machines on the Blackpool seafront in the early 1980s. In 1984, my dad bought a Commodore 64, and a little later I started helping my friend design games for the Dragon 32. I spent my first ever pay cheque on an Atari ST, and then my dad bought our first console, a Mega Drive, which I still have. When I went to university in 1991, I got into PC games, largely because I lived with two computer scientists who set up a LAN in our house so that we could play Doom together.