I remember many long nights as a kid where my friends and I would stay up late singing our lungs out and strumming away on our plastic guitars.

This was the golden age of music video games.

Sadly the era of gimmicky instruments and overly exaggerated dance moves now sits firmly in the past.

This, however, does not mean that we can't look back to the past and be filled with nostalgia when we revisit the most iconic titles from this era.

Here are our three picks for music games that fill us with nostalgia:

Introduced in Japan in 1998 as part of the Bemani series, and released in North America and Europe in 1999, Dance Dance Revolution is the pioneering series of the rhythm and dance genre in video games.

Players stand on a "dance platform" or stage and hit coloured arrows laid out in a cross with their feet to musical and visual cues.

Players are judged by how well they time their dance to the patterns presented to them and are allowed to choose more music to play to if they receive a passing score.

This game was a major hit with my friend group as we spent hours dancing away on the dodgy mobile DDR pad.

It was simple yet incredibly challenging, far more than the eventual movement games that followed on the Xbox Kinect and Playstation Move.

SingStar is a competitive music video game series for PlayStation consoles, developed by London Studio and published by Sony Computer Entertainment.

Dozens of instalments were released for the PlayStation 2, and several more for the PlayStation 3.

It is also available on the PlayStation 4 as a free app download, with users paying for the songs as individual or bundle downloads.

I blame this game for the early onset of croaks in my voice.

Perhaps if I hadn't so many nights singing Abba with my friends my voice wouldn't have broken as early as it did.

Nevertheless, I would not change those nights one bit because you know what, I was having the time of my life.

The Guitar Hero is a series of music rhythm games first published in 2005 by RedOctane and Harmonix, and distributed by Activision, in which players use a guitar-shaped game controller to simulate playing a lead, bass guitar, and rhythm guitar across numerous rock music songs.

Players match notes that scroll on-screen to coloured fret buttons on the controller, strumming the controller in time to the music in order to score points, and keep the virtual audience excited.

The games attempt to mimic many features of playing a real guitar, including the use of fast-fingering hammer-ons and pull-offs and the use of the whammy bar to alter the pitch of notes.

Most games support single player modes, typically a Career mode to play through all the songs in the game, and both competitive and cooperative multiplayer modes.

With the introduction of Guitar Hero World Tour in 2008, the game includes support for a four-player band including vocals and drums.

This game was the bread and butter of my childhood and early teen years.

To this day it remains one of my all-time favourite video games.