Game On

16 February 2009

If you want to see how a market sector can develop from relative obscurity to mainstream maturity in a little over a decade, look no further than the computer games sector. Everywhere you turn this Christmas there’s games advertising, and it’s not just for one console but for a full range of formats. Suddenly, games are big business and everyone from Microsoft to Dell wants a share of the action.

The shots of the wholesome Redknapp family, with granddad Harry, Jamie, Louise and someone who turns out to be Louise’s brother Sam, all playing Wii together show just how far we’ve come. This isn’t just something for the kids to enjoy – it crosses the generations.

I was deputy editor of the UK’s first PC games magazine at a publisher that had pretty much cornered the market for Nintendo and Sega devotees in the early 1990s. And back then, it really was a niche market. It’s hard to imagine a more geeky, juvenile workplace, although one of our writers went on to be a key executive at games publisher EA, so we must have been doing something right.

We would travel the world meeting the publishers of these obscure games, companies which have now become powerhouses of the games sector like EA itself, Mindscape and French-based Infogrames, owner of the Atari brand. I remember being at the opening of one of the first Game stores in Liverpool – now they’re on every high street.

As the companies that spurred this revolution have hit the big time, it’s interesting to ask why some made it while others fell by the wayside. From the games sector’s experience, much of it is down to sheer bloodymindedness. Playing those early shareware games you could never imagine that one day, Jamie and Louise Redknapp would be using those same motion sensor joysticks and networked steering wheels in a national TV ad campaign. But it’s about having the obstinacy to hang onto their idea until the technology that’s underpinning it catches up.

Take the example of one London success, Gamerbase. This networked games centre was opened by Dominic Mulroy and champion gamesplayer Sujoy Roy as a franchise in HMV’s Trocadero store in time for Christmas 2006. Its sale last month to HMV was a tribute to Mulroy’s determination and belief in his idea. He’d founded one of the UK’s first networked games centres in 1999 and actually set up a not-for-profit organisation, Interactive Gaming UK, to help others set up similar centres.

That first LAN-based gaming centre was a world apart from today’s state-of-the-art Gamerbase, with 80 Quad Core PCs and Dual Core notebooks networked together using the latest high-end switches. But the idea is pretty much the same and Mulroy himself says it seems like things have come full circle.

When the latest Redknapp, the curiously named Beau Henry, is starring in the Wii ads in another 10 years’ time, you can’t imagine what the latest fad will be – but the chances are it’ll be something that some enterprising young games players is working on right now.

By David Longworth, Webster Buchanan Research