Stuart joined AP before it even existed, in January 1991. Thanks to a mixture of animal cunning, fiendish subterfuge and outright intimidation, nobody rumbled him until issue 39.

"Subvert from within", said Jonathan. "Okey dokey", I confirmed. And with these words, I left to make my fortune in the crazy, zany, stark-raving-bonkers world of Sensible Software. Buying an expensive sports car for cover, I took a job as a humble Head Chief Senior Executive Vice-President Of International Gameplay Development Co-ordination. In practice, this meant answering the phone a lot and ordering pool tables and pinball machines for the play room downstairs with the company credit card, as well as designing most of the levels (except the crap ones, obviously) for Cannon Fodder 2 and HAVING NOTHING WHATSOEVER to do with Sensible Golf.

It's a strange life in the software 'biz'. For one thing, you only get a deadline about once a year, so whereas on AP nobody did any work for the first fortnight or so of an issue, then cobbled the whole thing together hastily in the last 10 days, in software development nobody does any work for the first 11 months or so, before cobbling the whole thing together hastily in the last 10 days. (Or, in Sensible's case, anything up to 18 months after the last 10 days). But it's boring. For every day you spend on the exciting business of planning and designing games, there's three or four weeks of sitting around twiddling your thumbs while the programmers actually go off and do stuff.

('Stuff' in this instance includes going out and getting ("Missed" - Ed), disappearing on holiday with your girlfriend, just plain old disappearing, and very occasionally nipping in to do 20 minutes' programming until the pubs open.) Then you spend a week finding bugs in what has been done, then it all starts again. For someone used to the more-or-less constant pressure and excitement of working on monthly magazines, it's almost unbearably slow-paced, and you also miss out on the instant rewards of seeing something produced that you can look at and be proud of at the end of every month.

The upside? Well, you get paid three times as much, you get a lot more respect (for no real reason) from people in the business, and you get to feel like you're actually creating something, rather than just criticising things other people have done. But then again, I always felt like that. I firmly believe that people get at least as much entertainment from a year's AMIGA POWER than they do from most games. Who's to say one's inherently less valuable than the other?

I'm glad I went to Sensible Software. I met some cool people (as well as some real tossers), I learned a lot about how the software industry really works (something which I hope to put to good use soon), I made a small pile of cash and I produced a game I'm still fiercely proud of (and which, quite frankly, you're all completely wrong about. Okay, the Alien Planet levels could have looked better. So bloody what?). But I'm even gladder to be back.

THE FUTURE IS NEARLY HERE. AGAIN.

What does all this teach us? Well, for one thing it teaches us that the Amiga is being deserted left, right and centre. This much we already knew. But for what? Surely everyone can't be heading for the lusher pastures of the PC? The PC, aside from its encyclopaedic catalogue of other obvious failings, has a piracy problem the like of which an Amiga game publisher's worst nightmare couldn't bring to life. And as for PC game sales generally, in the words of a well-known software publisher, "If it's not in the top two, you won't sell worth a ("Spit" - Ed)". I can confirm this from SINISTER INSIDER DEALINGS at Sensible Software - of over 300,000 copies of Sensible Soccer sold on all floppy disk formats, PC CD-ROM (the alleged format of the future) accounted for just 700 (that's seven hundred), with old-fashioned PC floppies not all that far ahead.

The answer, then, is clearly to be found in the 'next generation'. Sony Playstation, Sega Saturn, 3DO and so on. I've got them all (professional reasons, you understand), and I've played practically every game available for them. And perfectly lovely many of them are, too - Ridge Racer, for example, is a magnificent driving game which actually plays, thanks to the Playstation's ultra-cute joypad, better than the coin-op which it looks almost identical to.

But what everyone - magazine publishers, game developers, retailers - seems not to have noticed in the unseemly rush to abandon 16-bit formats is that all of these next-gen machines cost over £300. They are NOT impulse buys, like the SNES and Megadrive were. They will almost certainly NOT spark off another 1993-style superboom in the industry. The 16-bit machines, especially the consoles, were bought by (or more usually for) kids, who, while hugely fickle, are fanatical about such new toys, and will devote the kind of attention and spending to them while they ARE fashionable that created the early 90s boom in the first place. Evidence? Here at Future Publishing, the first issue of Gamesmaster magazine sold over 200,000 copies. The first circulation figures for Ultimate Future Games magazine (essentially the same thing but about the next generation, albeit without a TV tie-in) are around 30,000, barely one-seventh of the Gamesmaster figures.

The next-gen consoles are aimed at over-18s with big disposable incomes, and they're nowhere near as susceptible to buying the latest beat-'em-up to win peer status as the 12-year-old SNES owner was. The Saturn was released in very small numbers this summer, supposedly to create a hard-to-get excitement. But take a walk down your local High Street. Finding it difficult to buy one? Thought not. The Jaguar and 3DO have flopped already. At £400, the Saturn will be next.

I see a lot of next-generation games at very early stages of development. Many of them are going to be very good indeed. But I haven't seen anything yet that's going to impinge on the consciousness of the public at large in the way that Sonic, Mario or even the Lemmings did. I doubt that I ever will. The public's conception of video games will be stuck at Super Mario World (if we're lucky), the same way it was stuck at Space Invaders for almost 15 years until Sonic appeared on the scene. What does this tell us about the future? That it's going to be the same old same old, only less so. So tell us something we didn't know.

TOP FIVE PROS AND CONS OF WORKING IN THE SOFTWARE INDUSTRY

STU'S TOP TEN NEXT-GENERATION GAMES

1. Tempest 2000 (Jaguar)

2. Ridge Racer (Playstation)

3. Tekken (Playstation)

4. Gunner's Heaven (Playstation)

5. Return Fire (3DO)

6. Er...

7.

8.

9.

10.