The arrival of video gaming as an element in both my life and popular culture was heralded not with the visceral thrill of punk rock or the glacial romanticism of Joy Division (both of which would later go on to inform my lifelong love of pop music) but with the metronomic recreation of a slowly speeding up heartbeat. 'Duh-Deh. Duh-deh. Duh-deh'. It was the sound of rows of pixilated aliens advancing slowly downwards towards a blocky spaceship - it was Taito's Space Invaders and it would inform my lifelong love of computer games.
Purists point to 1962's SpaceWar, or the paddles and ball classic Pong as the birth of gaming but, despite its simplicity and the fact that you always lost in the end, it was the sheer popularity of Space Invaders that places it at gamings' year zero. It was Space Invaders that forced the Japanese mint to press more ¥100 pieces to feed players' demand; it was Space Invaders that captured mass imagination and it was Space Invaders that spawned an industry.
From kids shovelling 10p pieces into a cabinet in smoky seaside arcades, gaming has created a market now worth £3.7billion across Western Europe - the sort of high-score figure most gamers can only dream about. The smoky arcades soon spawned simple home consoles (remember the once-powerful Atari?), which led to rudimentary home computers that created a cottage industry of home programmers, pushing the machines to their limits (and for which a burgeoning retro-gaming market now exists). Many of those early games programmers would later go on to become major players in the modern-day business.
Then, as public interest waned, the modern gaming era began. Nintendo introduced its 8-bit (a measure of processing power - the equivalent amount needed to create a modern shortcut icon on a desktop PC) home entertainment console in the mid Eighties. It was a direct forerunner of the systems that are so popular now. The new home consoles gave us household names such as Mario and Sonic the Hedgehog, and the rise of the unlikeliest success of them all, a simple yet infuriatingly addictive puzzle game invented by Alexey Pajitnov, entitled Tetris.
Within 10 years gaming was no longer a niche hobby enjoyed by the socially maladjusted. Sony joined the party in 1995 and became dominant. Lara Croft (a fictional character created from numbered code, let's not forget) became an icon, Metal Gear Solid took hold, and the explosion in processing power of PCs has meant that fragging aliens or racing at Monte Carlo is becoming more realistic and absorbing with every new release.
As games playing has grown, so its demographic has changed, now including a large age and gender mix and increasingly targeting adults with disposable incomes - some of whom cannot help but hear echoes of that repetitive Space Invaders mantra ringing down the years.
