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You wouldn't think it to look at them, but the two wry northerners tucking into a chicken curry and a veggie burger in a quiet backstreet Manchester pub are among the most prolific and eclectic games developers Britain has ever produced. John Pickford, the coder, and Ste Pickford, the artist, have worked together for the best part of thirty years, clocking up a staggering 86 credited games between them.

Code Britannia is an ongoing series of interviews with seminal British games designers, looking back over their careers and the changing face of gaming.

Mel Croucher's name comes up rather a lot, although not generally in everyday conversation. He's rarely listed alongside the giants of game design, nor are his games likely to elicit much recognition from anyone other than the most devoted 8-bit retro nut. Talk to any of the developers who were around at the same time, however, and his name is like catnip. Most hail him as an inspiration. Some even go that little bit further and use the word "hero".

Joe Danger and No Man's Sky developer Hello Games has been flooded, its office ruined.

Like Arsenal, FIFA 14 has finished 2013 top of its respective table: the UK top 40 video games chart.

We've had our say on 2013's best video games. And so have you. Now, it's the turn of the developers, the makers of the virtual experiences we so love. Read on for the games of 2013 according to the creators of the likes of Super Meat Boy, Assassin's Creed 4, XCOM, Oculus Rift and more, complete with Twitter bios.

2014 is upon us, and it promises riches and glory unlike any year before it. With their launches under their belts, the next generation of consoles will, hopefully, show us what they're made of. Virtual reality headsets may make their mark on the mainstream. And with a raft of crowdfunded games due out over the next 12 months, 2014 should tell us whether all that money we pumped into promising projects on Kickstarter was worth it.

It was always going to be Sony and Microsoft's year. When the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 launched in November, it wasn't just the climax of a publicity roadshow that stretched back to February - a roadshow that was at times messy and scandalous, as well as entertaining and exhilarating. It goes back to a time when all we had were codenames like Orbis and Durango, accompanied by whispered speculation. It stretches back even before then, too.

We're trailing towards the end of the year, so it's a time of excess, tubby tummies and endless top ten lists. Except this year counting to ten seemed like far too much effort, so instead we decided to compile a list of some of our personal favourite - or, perhaps, most noteworthy - moments in gaming this year. I hope you enjoy it, and please let us know some of your own suggestions.

There have been better games this year. There have been more ambitious ones. In terms of scale, Grand Theft Auto 5 throws Saints Row 4's production budget onto the screen between 30-60 frames per second. None of them have made me grin so much from start to finish though, or made me so sad to hit the final mission and know the good times were about to end. Quite an achievement for a series that started out actually offending me for how much it ripped off GTA to finish by making me wish GTA 5's cash had bought it even 1/10th of its sense of fun.

There's a room within EAD Tokyo's offices where the employees working on new 3D Mario games stick Post-It notes of ideas on the walls. Only about one in every 50 makes it into the games, claims producer Koichi Hayashida, but I strongly suspect that there were a few empty walls by the end of development on Super Mario 3D World. Every level is a non-stop bombardment of stuff, with familiar concepts and enemies used in fresh and exciting ways, and brand new ingredients liberally sprinkled on top.

It was around 3am when the rain started again at the Nurburgring. Much harder than before, to the point where the track was completely saturated. Not ideal, clearly, but as even the most dishonest motivational speaker has no doubt memorised, inside every problem there's an opportunity.

The best item in Dota 2 is the Force Staff.

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Earlier this month I celebrated the 30th anniversary of my first published article - tips for Atari's Pole Position coin-op that I wrote as a teen for Computer and Video Games magazine. I still remember the impact that game had on me the first time I sat inside its cabinet. Today it looks comically blocky, sounds like an angry hornet, and handles like a series of multiple-choice questions - but in 1983, my imagination anti-aliased its chunky pixels, conjured F1 music from its furious buzzing, and fooled me into believing I really was driving a racing car at 200mph. It made my heart pound and I left the machine almost breathless.

Diablo 3 was supposed to be my game of 2012, but it wasn't. As a recovering World of Warcraft player, I thought its accelerated, flamboyant grind would be just the lightweight substitute I was looking for. I'd been following its development for years and already knew how fun it was to play. I was convinced this would be a long-term affair.

A year ago, film critic Mark Kermode came out in defence of the Twilight movies. "The world is full of people... Who feel not just enabled but dutybound to be sniffy about Twilight without having seen the films, read the books, or attempted to understand why they mean so much to so many," he wrote.

Even if Lucas Pope had had one million dollars to develop Papers, Please, even if he'd had an army of engineers, animators and producers at his disposal, even if he'd had all the time in the world, he wouldn't have produced a better Papers, Please than the one he did all by himself.

Eurogamer's alpha and beta reviews are reviews of games that are still in development but are already being offered for sale or funded by micro-transactions. They offer a preliminary verdict but have no score attached. For more information, read our editor's blog.

The first time I visited Hong Kong was in 1987. The ferry rocked into port, foghorn blaring as the city stirred beneath a greasy morning smog. After setting foot on the dock I was dragged into a ten-dollar arm wrestling match by a seamy congregation wearing wife beaters and sucking on cheap cigarettes. Moments later my bag was stolen, prompting me into an amateur parkour trip down alleyways in a bid to retrieve it. No dice. If only I'd taken up an offer ten minutes earlier to pawn all my stuff.

Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs doesn't make a whole lot of sense and that's fine. I don't think it's meant to when even its creator admits that he has "two or three fairly contradictory interpretations of what might be going on at the end of Pigs at the same time". Pigs, as I'll call it for short, hangs its remarkable artistic achievements (Dan Pinchbeck's flowery, rotten prose; Jessica Curry's screeching, shrapnel bomb of a score; Sindre Grønvoll's's Grand Guignol labyrinthine environments) around the most threadbare of plots. Instead of focusing on a pat little tale, it creates an atmosphere of dread so potent that the conventional criteria of what we look for in a game - things like puzzles, plot, win/lose conditions - are thrown completely out the window in favour of an abstract, wondrous experience that hits notes other games simply don't. That it's so hard to grasp only adds to its charm.

That Lara Croft: Reflections trademark relates to a mobile collectible card game, it has been revealed.

Money continues to flood into the coffers of PC exclusive space trading and combat video game Star Citizen: it's now raised an astronomical $35 million.

FIFA 14 is the UK's Christmas 2013 number one video game.

Nintendo has had a strange couple of years as a game console platform holder, but Animal Crossing: New Leaf was a timely reminder that it can be a peerless game developer - as were games like Fire Emblem, Pokemon X and Y and Super Mario 3D World. What a year Nintendo's had, in fact! All the same, I wouldn't recommend Animal Crossing: New Leaf to a new player any more, even though it's close enough to being my game of 2013.

It started off as a joke. Have you heard the one about Farming Simulator, a game in which you plough lonely fields in a tractor? Well, how about Chemical Spillage Simulator, the one in which you get to sample the glamour of life in a hazmat suit? And hey, get this, there's even a series called Euro Truck Simulator in which all you do is haul freight across the motorways of Europe.

When our sun explodes, I hope Robotron: 2084 survives. I'd lose Moby Dick, Angkor Wat, and The Well-Tempered Clavier to the flames if I absolutely had to, but I'd like to see Robotron, its cabinet sleek and its dark screen inscrutable, flung deep into the cosmos on a lonely spar of rock, so that alien life can one day plug it in and play it and know what terrible people we were.

I remember a lot from Christmas 1996, the year when I got my Sega Saturn: my mum button-mashing her way to victory in Virtua Fighter 2, my granddad driving safely within the speed limit in Sega Rally. Then there was NiGHTS Into Dreams, Sonic Team's answer to Super Mario 64 and Crash Bandicoot. And what an answer it was: flying through children's dreams as an androgynous purple jester, it was Sega at its most creative - and, perhaps, its most commercially suicidal.

Season's greetings all!