I’ve written about nostalgia on these pages before – specifically, the way it manifests itself in the form of inane memes bemoaning the scarcity of instant mash and white dog turds in modern society. (As an aside: was the whiteness of the turds in any way connected to all the instant mash they fed their dogs?) And I remember musing on the pervasive, inevitable nature of nostalgia: that however much our younger selves refuse to accept it, ultimately we all end up carrying on like the furious boomer with a selective memory and an instinct towards oversharing.

My reason for returning to the subject is that I’m currently having a very pleasant time playing the recent-ish remakes of the classic Grand Theft Auto video games from the early 2000s. Back then, I played them so obsessively as to wear out four or five Playstation controllers. Coming back to them now, I find I remember great chunks of them with absolute clarity: the city layouts, the oh-so-frustrating radio control plane missions, even large parts of the dialogue. And I’m playing them to the exclusion of almost everything else, while hundreds of more recent, technologically superior games in my collection sit unplayed and unloved, gathering virtual dust.

You may recall that at the time, the GTA games were massively controversial. The violence, which even in remastered form looks entirely cartoonish now, was the subject of endless tabloid hand-wringing. Calls to ban each game followed its release as dependably as a Vice City police van follows a man in a Hawaiian shirt who’s just shot down a helicopter.

None of this did the slightest harm to the success of the games – quite the contrary in fact, as publishers Rockstar knew perfectly well. And those of us actually playing them were adamant that we might have stolen thousands of pretend cars over the years, but it never did us any harm. Looking back, we were nostalgists in the making.

But now, as I tootle around the familiar landscapes of San Andreas, I realise that these games have become the manifestation of my descent into a nostalgic fury-spiral from which I’m unlikely to emerge unscathed. Not because I’d rather play a game from two decades ago than a shiny new one – I’m absolutely fine with that – but because of the epic quest I ended up undertaking in order to play them at all.

Venerable as these games are, the process of buying them felt almost archetypally modern. They were released, via the usual online stores, to a slew of horrific reviews. Rockstar, realising it had a problem, set about fixing the various problems through a series of game updates, until eventually they had a product that might actually be worth buying. Noting that, I added them to my wishlist, waited for them to appear on sale and, when the moment was right, bought them with a single click of a mouse button. Job done, or so I imagined.

Now, the original versions of these games were essentially the last hurrah of an offline world. You could only buy them in physical form, and you didn’t need to log in to play them – in fact, you couldn’t. There was no recourse for a company that put out a game with glaring flaws; they simply ended up with an expensive dud on their hands. So there was a healthy incentive for them not to do that.

But to play the new version of the game, I had to log into my Rockstar account. Naturally, I’d forgotten the password, so I requested a new one. Nothing happened. It slowly dawned on me that my account was linked to a defunct email address. I asked the internet what I could do about this situation, and the internet told me I’d need extensive documentation and a good deal of doggedness.

Lacking either, I grumpily resigned myself to having spent twenty-odd quid on a remake I could never play of three games I already owned. And I thought about all the other games that I thought I owned, but whose login screens I may never again get past, barring a miracle of memory.

Riding to the rescue was my best pal – with whom I’ve been playing video games since the ‘80s – who worked out that there was another solution: buying them in physical form for the Nintendo Switch, thus bypassing the need to prove to a bot that I am, in fact, me.

So he quietly picked them up for my birthday, legend that he is, and I’ve been contentedly working my way through them ever since. And I’m quite enjoying the irony that the thing that finally turned me into a frothing-at-the-mouth nostalgist was my complete inability to get online, in order to revisit an offline world from the beginning of the century.

You’d best block me before I circulate a meme about it. ■