On Friday night we had the enormous pleasure of welcoming Dominik Diamond back to British shores, and not just for a wander around the arcade either, but for his first set of of performances in this country in 17 years!

Dominik Diamond Sings the Video Games was, in the best possible way, completely ridiculous. It was funny, warm, occasionally filthy in spirit if not always in language, and entirely its own thing, somewhere between a gig, a comedy show, a GamesMaster reunion and the sort of evening where you find yourself thinking, “I cannot believe this is happening,” before immediately deciding that this is exactly the sort of thing that should be happening.

Dominik’s particular brand of comedy was all over it, naturally, as he told stories from the old GamesMaster days, wandered through memories of the people and games that dominated that era, and then launched into songs he had written and performed over the last year. There were H.R. disasters in Space Invaders, and the quite brilliant account of how Frogger’s parents were so catastrophically bad at parenting that they never taught her (yes HER, a necessary artistic choice built around daughter rhyming with water!) to swim, which is especially unforgivable when you consider that she is, in fact, a frog.

The brilliant thing was that it never felt like somebody simply turning up to do a greatest hits version of the past. Dominik brought the past with him, certainly, but he also made it feel alive and slightly dangerous again, as though GamesMaster had been locked in a cupboard for nearly two decades and had finally got out, had a drink, found a microphone and decided to explain the emotional life of Pac-Man.

And all of this was happening in the middle of an arcade, surrounded by people who had grown up with those games, people who had watched GamesMaster religiously, people who remembered where they were when a particular game came out, and people who had perhaps never seen the programme at all but were quite happy to spend an evening watching a grown man defend the honour of Dundee as a setting for Grand Theft Auto through song.

That is what made the night feel special. It was not just nostalgia, because nostalgia on its own can be a bit like reheated gravy. This was something more alive than that. It was a room full of people being reminded that games have always been about more than the machines themselves. They are about the people you played them with, the arguments you had, the places you went, the sounds you remember, the friends you made and the strange but enduring fact that somebody else, somewhere, also remembers the exact same thing.

Games bring people together. We say that a lot, and usually it sounds like the sort of sentence that would appear on a corporate poster beside a photograph of two people smiling at a controller, but on nights like this you actually see it happening. You see strangers talking, people comparing memories, somebody explaining a game to somebody else, somebody else remembering an even worse game, and suddenly a room full of people who arrived separately are all part of the same little story.

So thank you to everyone who came along, and thank you to Dominik for coming back after 17 years and making such a bloody brilliant evening of it.