Sensible Soccer and 7 more to feature on Royal Mail games stamps

2nd class: Elite (1984)

An incredible technical achievement, Elite somehow managed to cram a fully explorable universe into the BBC Micro's 48kb of memory and offered an openworld 3D experience decades ahead of its time complete with interplanetary trading, space battles and the infamously tricky process of docking with space stations. Co-creator David Braben raised a staggering £1.5 million from fans in a 2014 Kickstarter campaign to fund Elite: Dangerous, a AAA remake for current-generation PCs and consoles.

2nd class: Worms (1995)

A classic multiplayer party game, Worms was a turn-based strategy shooter featuring heavily-armed earthworms. The vermiculate vagabonds take turns to shoot each other with a variety of over-the-top weapons as likely to catch an ally in the crossfire as to take down their target. Notable as one of the few games where you could give your characters a regional accent - Scots, Scouse and Yorkshire dialect were all options. Grew into a huge franchise, so whatever your console of choice there's sure to be a Worms game oavailable for it.

1st class: Sensible Soccer (1992)

Forget EA Sports - for most of the 90s the undisputed kings of the footy game were eccentric British outfit Sensible Software. Sensi, as the studio's landmark football title was known to fans, was a revelation - fast, easy to pick up but hard to master; and stuffed with the studio's trademark humour. Arguably the definitive version is Sensible World of Soccer (SWOS), the first game to feature hundreds of real-world teams, competitions and players, but for the stamp Royal Mail have gone with the 1992 original. Sensible veteran Jon Hare is currently working on Sociable Soccer, a spiritual successor for mobile and console.

1st class: Lemmings (1991)

Bundled in with the insanely popular Amiga 500+ home computer, Lemmings was a breakout hit for Dundee studio DMA Design. A maddening puzzle game, it put players indirectly in charge of a herd of green-haired rodents with absolutely no sense of self-preservation, who must be guided to the exit past a variety of lethal traps. Its cute visuals hid a sadistic core: many levels could only be completed by sacrificing one or more lemmings as exploding "bombers", a design choice that probably wouldn't make it off the drawing board post-9/11. The commercial success of Lemmings and its sequels gave DMA the creative freedom to work on an edgy new idea for their next big project. Its name? Grand Theft Auto.

£1.55: Wipeout (1995)

The original PlayStation revolutionised games by making 3D the new standard, and no game did more to show off the technology's potential than Wipeout. Developed in Liverpool, the futuristic racer seemed almost impossibly fast and effortlessly cool. The series has featured on every generation of PlayStation hardware, and if you own a PSVR headset you can play the latest version in virtual reality - it's every bit as exhilerating as you might imagine, but hold on to your lunch.

£1.55: Micro Machines (1991)

One of the all-time great uses of an official product licence, Micro Machines had the simple but brilliant idea of racing a child's toy cars around to-scale domestic environments: there were racetracks on a dining table, a pool table, a classroom, a garden and even a level racing tiny speedboats around a bathtub. Developers Codemasters clearly got the racing game bug, as they specialise in the genre to this day - most recently the DiRT Rally and GRiD series.

£1.60: Dizzy (1987)

Another Codemasters classic, Dizzy was a cheerful egg who starred in a range of surreal and notoriously difficult adventure games whose puzzles largely involved moving objects from one place to another to get past obstacles. Its creators, the Oliver twins, were at one time reckoned to be responsible for 7% of all game sales in the UK.

£1.60: Populous (1992)

These days when virtually every game involves driving cars, shooting guns or some some combination of the two, it's easy to forget how varied games were in the 90s. 'God games' were a popular genre in their own right and this was the one that started it all off. Populous gave you a small tribe of worshippers and various ways of influencing the development of their civilisation, all with the ultimate aim of wiping out rival believers - which, frankly, sounds a bit less like harmless escapism in 2020 than it did at the time.

What do you think of this line-up?

Have the Royal Mail done a first class job picking these games, or would you have gone for something different? Let us know in the comments!