The old days had a Pong

It's always a bit of a laugh to look back on the old days - the embarrassing outfits the parents wore, the dross they listened to, driving around in Ford Cortinas, "smooching" at discotheques. It was an era when people heated their dinner up in the oven and had to get up off their bums if they wanted to change the television station. And you really did dial a phone number.

The 1970s also saw the advent of the video game. Unfortunately enough, it was called Pong, and it was a game of tennis. Well, not like any tennis game you might see today, but there were rackets and a ball: the rackets were little rectangles and the ball was a tiny square. It also had sound effects: "Pock . . . pock . . . pock . . ." It was 2D, black and white, and had that mellow, laid-back feel of groovy yore.

Things changed quickly, through Space Invaders and Pacman, and soon colourful racing-car games in arcades were all the rage. The 1980s saw the blossoming of console games: Nintendo was doing Mario World and Donkey Kong, while Atari was doing conversions of arcade games. Then came the Sega Megadrives, bringing more arcade flash into the sitting room with the likes of Sonic the Hedgehog.

This decade, both the rapid development of the PC and huge improvements in graphics technology have seen change at a pretty dramatic rate.

Just five years ago no one had a PlayStation, Lara Croft was Lara who? and if you wanted to play a PC game you had to be a whiz kids at configuring memory in DOS because almost every PC game ran only in DOS. Few people had a CD-ROM drive; most games came on diskettes and took forever to download. However today, despite those 3D accelerators, sound cards, PlayStations and whatever you're having yourself, what is set to be the big hit this Christmas?

The re-release of Pong. It's not quite the same as it's original format of course - there's a bit of colour, 3D graphics, and more exotic sound effects. In fact, it's a common criticism of video games: there isn't anything really all that new coming on stream. In 1991, Wolfenstein 3D, a one-player graphic shoot-'em-up was launched, a forerunner to Doom and, ultimately, Quake.

In 1994 the big hits were Zelda 3, Sim City 2000 and Doom. In 1999 some of the bigger hits are Zelda: The Ocarina of Time and Sim City 3000, while Quake III: Arena continues the Doom theme.

With technological developments you can play differently. In Doom you could only aim at an enemy standing in front of you; in Quake you can fire from above and below your opponents. But essentially you're still playing the same game.

Cluedo, Backgammon, Monopoly - you can now play all sorts of board games on your PC too. Even Speed Freaks, the game produced by the Irish division of Funcom, is basically an old-fashioned arcade game which employs the perks of technological development.