© Netflix

Charlie Brooker's superb Black Mirror series may have catapulted him to global fame, but what viewers of the twisted yet utterly compelling science fiction show might not know is that he started his career as a games journalist in the UK before making the leap into comedy and TV writing.

Brooker was recently a guest on the BBC's iconic Desert Island Discs programme - where famous faces pick the tracks they'd take with them into hypothetical seclusion, along with a luxury item and a book - and he paid tribute to his video gaming roots by selecting the main theme from the Game Boy version of Robocop, composed by Jonathan Dunn.

His reason for choosing it? "It's a piece of music that's better than it had to be for a Game Boy game." As you can see from Brooker's music selection, the Robocop theme is found nestled neatly among tracks from The Beatles, The Pixies and Radiohead.

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Brooker touched upon his love of gaming during the show, picking the Nintendo Switch as the luxury item he would take to his desert island, and saying:

I was fascinated by this thought that you could control an image on a television, it was like a magical thing to me. From that point on I was hooked. I remember getting a ZX80 [home computer], I saved and I begged until I got a Spectrum in 1982. From a very early age I thought - there is something about this as a form of entertainment that I can't get enough of.

Brooker's career began when he was commissioned to draw a series of comic strips to promote the UK chain Computer Exchange (now more commonly know as CEX) in the early '90s. This led to writing for video games magazine PC Zone:

I always knew I wanted to work in comedy but couldn't find a way into it. I started off writing video game reviews for a magazine because I'd been making comic book strips for a video game shop and one of the writers said: 'Why don't you try writing some video game reviews?'. I remember thinking, 'I'm not qualified for this'. I was annoyed I didn't know my way into things.

© Invision for Netflix / Blair Raughley

Brooker's move into television writing saw him contribute to the likes of Brass Eye and The 11 O'Clock Show, before he hosted his own series of "Wipe" programmes aimed at poking fun at other TV shows. However, Black Mirror is perhaps his most famous creation; it began life on the UK's Channel 4 in 2011 before being picked up by Netflix. Series 4 has just gone live on the streaming service.

Critically acclaimed since its launch, the series picked up Primetime Emmy Awards for Outstanding Television Movie and Outstanding Writing for a Limited Series, Movie, or Dramatic Special for the series 3 episode San Junipero.

You can listen to the whole Desert Island Discs broadcast here.