After years of sprawling ‘forever’ games, players are rediscovering the pleasures of more focused experiences. Could a new wave of independent arcades bring back the social side of gaming?

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There’s an important semi-nostalgic movement happening in games, and I’m excited about where it’s heading. But I don’t want to get ahead of myself here.

Over the last five years, major publishers, obsessed with the success of “forever games” such as Fortnite, Minecraft and Roblox, have been throwing hundreds of millions of dollars into their own sprawling, endlessly updating, battle-pass-infested mega franchises – each designed to take all our time and money. The result has been astounding failures such as Concord, Mindseye and Tales of the Shire. Even the good games – Crimson Desert, Path of Exile 2, Blood of the Dawnwalker – are so bloated they have become the unyielding masters of our precious few hours of free time.

The first console I ever bought, it was hyped as a threat to the PlayStation, then mocked as a flop. But now, as it marks its 25th anniversary, it’s looked back on with misty-eyed reverence

This week marks the 25th anniversary of the Nintendo GameCube, the first console I ever bought with my own money. I vividly remember getting on the bus after school with a year’s worth of savings safely zipped into the pocket of my bag and going to a branch of Currys, where I dumped a bunch of notes, coins and vouchers on the counter to collect my pre-order. (It turned out that some of the vouchers from the previous Christmas had expired, but the guy at the checkout clearly felt so sorry for me that he redeemed them anyway. If you’re out there, Currys guy: thank you for taking pity on a desperate 13-year-old.)

If it hadn’t been for the ill-fated Wii U console, whose failure to take off in 2012 resulted in the first unprofitable periods in Nintendo’s game-making history, the GameCube would be remembered as the company’s biggest flop aside from the infamous Virtual Boy, from 1995. Released in Japan this week in 2001 (and in May 2002 in Europe), this surprisingly powerful purple cube sold less than the Xbox and the PlayStation 2. With its squat, colourful form and unusual controller, arranged around a big traffic-light-green A button and small analogue sticks designed for small hands, it had a hint of Fisher-Price about it.