In hindsight, and with all apologies, Spelunky is like smoking. I got into it in part because it's what all the cool kids were doing at the time. It was embarrassingly easy to get wrong at first, but quickly became a soothing, easily-consumed daily habit. This lead to an effortless-seeming fluency, internalising both the basic routines and the nuanced flourishes that come from years of increasingly instinctive repetition. And it kills me. Death is certain, usually accidental but never escaped - if you reach either of the game's endings, something it took me about three years and perhaps five hundred hours' play to be able to do more than one in every twenty tries, the final score screen lists cause of death as "old age".

The magic comes from the ingredients being so simple. At heart, it's a roguelike disguised as a basic and sweetly-styled platformer: you run, you jump, you have a simple melee attack and you have some bombs you can throw. Everything you encounter has a very simple moveset, and kills you. Spikes kill you instantly if you fall on them. Blocks kill you instantly if they fall on you. Bats drift towards you on a shallow diagonal trajectory, and can easily nibble away your health points if you don't hit them just so. Frogs hop, and do the same. Small aliens zap you from their saucers - although you can bring the saucers down by throwing something, which causes them to explode and kill you. This can happen on the other side of the level, without your involvement, and you only know it from the sound of a distant explosion from which a landmine comes flying out, and hits you, and kills you.

On each death, the world is remade: each cutely-themed level randomly regenerated, the enemies randomly placed, the route to the exit strewn with challenges that are individually very simple but combine in endlessly treacherous ways: the bat which knocks you into a tiki trap, the monkey that knocks you into a spike pit, the yeti which smacks you into the void. The appeal of Spelunky is the same live, die, repeat routine so cherished in the Souls games, but with a platformer's simplicity that makes it far easier to understand and far more appealing to retry.

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As Eurogamer turns 20, we thought, you know what? It's not all about us. It's also about the developers, the people behind the virtual magic that inspired the creation of Eurogamer two decades ago. Without the developers, we wouldn't be here. And so, we thought we'd ask a few of them (20, in fact!) to pick the games that defined the last 20 years, and see what would come of it.

We approached a broad range of people, from top executives and legendary talent to tiny indies. We asked them to pick a game that defined the last 20 years, but left it up to them to interpret the question. It could be a game that defined the industry, that meant a lot to them professionally or personally, or is just a favourite.

We're delighted with the responses (thank you to everyone who contributed!). There's some fantastic insight here, super cool anecdotes and the odd surprising choice. We hope you enjoy it!

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Welcome to another week of Five of the Best, a series where we celebrate the overlooked parts of video games. They're the kind of things you don't pay much attention to at the time, but which spring readily to mind years later, proving just how memorable they were. So far we've had potions, hands, and dinosaurs - an eclectic bunch! - and we've enjoyed reading your suggestions as much as sharing ours. Today, then, another batch, another five. And the theme...

Shops! Oh, how many virtual registers we've rung over the years. Imagine a role-playing game without one - you can't. It would be sacrilege. You simply must visit a new shop in every town and have their wares be slightly more powerful than they were where you came from. Everyone knows that. But there are so many shops, it's often hard to remember a single one.

It's not just RPGs. I remember ogling the superbikes for sale in Road Rash and then crashing them when I eventually saved up enough money to buy them. I remember spending ages shopping for shorts and T-shirts in a knock-off GAP in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. And I've probably spent more money than I should have on costumes in Fortnite, which is hardly my fault when they sell such silly costumes, is it?!

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This piece contains spoilers for Sea of Thieves.

For a while, a university friend of mine rented a bedsit in which one of the walls came with the clear ghost of an old door on it. You could run your hand over the plaster and feel the bumps and ridges where a doorway had been filled in. The weird thing is that there was a room-shaped gap on the other side of the wall, and no clear way of getting into it. It wasn't like the owner had decided to move the entrance to the bathroom, say. Instead, there was now a hidden room in the house - not very well hidden, granted - and who knew what was in there?

A hidden room. The effect is uncanny, I think - an intriguing, bewildering word which is even better in the original German, where it's unheimlich. Heimlich itself means secret or concealed, I gather. For years I had it in my head that it meant homelike. (Heim is the thing that got me confused.) Unhomelike is the best of all. What could be less homelike than discovering a hidden room in a place you think you have already come to know well?

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