I think there’s a case to be made that the card slot placement on the n-Gage is what killed Nokia. I mean there was nothing inherently wrong with a hybrid phone/console. The meteoric rise of mobile gaming since then has proved that. So if they’d done the n-Gage properly, Nokia could have been at the head of the pack, the Nintendo of mobile (in every sense; Nintendo doesn’t play by everyone else’s rules, but survives because it’s Nintendo, and similarly, if Nokia had already positioned itself as the leader in mobile gaming, with AAA exclusives and all that, its failure to see Andoid coming might not have mattered so much). But with that one idiotic, braindead, who-the-hell-thought-this-was-a-good-idea, design flaw, they totally blew it.

Okay, so it’s a bit much to say it, alone, killed the company. But getting it right might have saved them.

“HuCards must have been a wonder of miniaturisation at the time.”

I never saw a PC Engine at the time (they were mythical beasts of great power that you only heard about in hushed whispers in those pre-Internet days), but as you say, Master System cards were basically identical. And yes, they were. Again, as you pointed out, they were lower-capacity than cartridges, so tended to carry the less-impressive games, but back in the late ’80s there was something ineffably cool about having a whole actual videogame on something the size and shape of a credit card.

I still sit in awed wonder sometimes that I can carry my entire CD collection – 29 days of music, at the last count – on a micro-SD card that if I’m holding it in my hand and sneeze I can’t find it again for hours. What a time to be alive, eh?

“PS1 discs have a bizarre black colour on the data side (apparently to prevent piracy – it didn’t work)”

Looks cool, though.