The reason I love videogames, I think, is that every few years they absolutely flatten me. They destroy my sense of what's possible and replace it with something new and weird. Impossible Mission did this back on the Commodore 64 - a game, but so stylish, so transporting! (I would not have framed it that way at the time; I was probably six or so.) And then Wonder Boy 3 came along, a platformer in which left and right didn't matter - you could go anywhere.
This chain of little explosions never really ended, but maybe it did slow down a bit. The opening to Another World - actually Another World in its entirety, its sense of what gameplay could be. The sheer visual delight of Jet Set Radio. And more recently, VR.
VR absolutely astonished me. And yet I didn't expect it to. I thought at the time that it was going to be a tech thing - a thing that would impress me but leave me slightly cold, like an Unreal graphics demo. But when Oculus arrived in our office I found myself itching to unpack it. I then had a week of just screwing around with it, one of my favourite weeks in all the years of doing this job. And it turned out VR wasn't a tech thing at all. Or rather, tech had allowed for something that did not feel like tech, like frame-rates and fidelity and all that jazz that I love, but which generally goes over my head. Tech had allowed for something toylike and - that word again - transporting. As with Impossible Mission, Wonder Boy, as with Jet Set Radio's Tokyo-to, I was leaving my desk and arriving somewhere new.