Launching on Channel 4 in 1992, GamesMaster brought video games to teatime television, with a mixture of challenges, celebrity guests and expert reviews, all corralled by the disembodied head of astronomer Patrick Moore (in character as the titular GamesMaster) and the winking, pun-filled humour of host Dominik Diamond.

The conundrum of how to represent the excitement of playing video games on television has been a decades-long debate (and one ultimately sidestepped by the rise of E-Sports, Twitch livestreams and Let's Play YouTube videos). GamesMaster adopted the tried-and-tested challenge game show format, as young hopefuls played popular games of the day and competed for the coveted Golden Joystick, in front of a spirited studio audience with live commentary from Diamond and a roster of games critics and pundits (including many journalists from the then-booming world of video game magazines, such as Mean Machine's Julian 'Jaz' Rignall).

Moore, a household name thanks to decades as the nation's leading authority on astronomy and host of The Sky at Night, is here cast as an ambivalent outsider figure: a character whose camp, cantankerous quality was no doubt informed by the veteran broadcaster's relative ignorance towards the likes of Sonic the Hedgehog and Simon's Quest.

In this edition, the first episode of the series' initial seven-year run, the GamesMaster format appears almost fully formed, complete with a gothic-industrial, retrofuturistic aesthetic that saw St Paul's Church in London transformed into a chaotic, steampunk rave - a neat approximation of the grungy spirit of the pop cultural moment, and the attitude of video game fandom of the time. Future episodes would see Diamond and co taken to prison, hell, heaven and back as they followed the medium through this surge of popularity across the 1990s.

Challenges in this edition include a coin-collecting race through Nintendo platformer Super Mario Bros. 3, a gunslinging jaunt through the 'full motion video' Western shoot-em-up Mad Dog McCree, and a head-to-head on the football game Manchester United Europe between a young man from Bishop's Stortford and Wimbledon striker John Fashanu.