One cry is being heard more than most above the clamour, though, and that's the plea for the new machine, whenever it might appear and whatever it might be called (though it would seem insanity to throw away the PS brand now), to be backwards-compatible with the original Playstation. In recent weeks, prominent members of the development, games publishing, retail and magazine communities have all been heard urging Sony to take a step that some of us have been calling for for years. Leading the gang of developers is Sensible Software's Jon Hare.

"We HAVE to head towards a single format, everything else in the world has a single format with multiple manufacturers. If Sony make the PS2 backwards-compatible, that'd be a good start, but we have to get completely away from the division of platforms. Even the PC and the PS have to essentially become one machine - you have to aim at a single box that plugs into any kind of display mechanism, and it you want to do business things on it you buy an add-on keyboard and so on, if you just want a games machine you just have the box and a joypad or whatever. I don't even want to differentiate between business and games machines, that's just splitting the market in two. You can watch TFI Friday and World In Action on the same TV, after all. "

But one of the main arguments put forward by those who don't believe in backwards compatibility is that it's specifically the public who demand this continuous high-paced technological advancement. They've grown used to having to throw their old machines and games away, they don't care about continuity or gameplay, they just want a new bit of sexy high-tech kit.

"But they don't! They want better software, not better machines. That's what people want for their tellies, that's what they want for their videos, their CD players. They want a good machine, but once they've got one they're happy. It's only hardware manufacturers who profit out of the way things are just now. To be honest, if we were still working on the Spectrum, I'd be happier than with the situation we're in now. You'd have one machine, it'd be in millions and billions of homes, you could produce a good game, if it takes a long time you can just carry on and give it another year, because the format's still going to be there and as long as you produce quality you know it's going to sell loads, because the machine's in millions and billions of homes. What we've got now is a fractured market where you just can't afford to spend any time on anything."

This, surely, has to be a major concern to everyone who's currently earning their living from the games business. As games get more and more sophisticated and complex, the time it takes to produce one has increased exponentially - you could knock out a Spectrum game in your bedroom in four weeks, whereas nowadays anyone suggesting they can do a triple-A title in less than 18 months is laughed out of the office or tested for drug abuse. Anything with even a slightly troubled development (Heart Of Darkness - and blimey, it's nothing more than a nicely-animated 2D platformer, after all - or Mission Impossible, say) slips into years. Worryingly, though, at the same time, the lifespan of hardware is falling - the Speccy and C64 both had lifespans of around a decade, but the ST and Amiga struggled to reach 6 and 7 years, and the Mega Drive and SNES were both dead in the water in less than 5 (and hey, those are the successful ones - let's not even start thinking about stuff like 3DO, Jaguar and Saturn). It doesn't take a great deal of extrapolating on the graph to reach the point where it takes longer to develop a game for a machine than the time the machine's actually around for. I asked Codemasters producer Gavin Raeburn if he was worried that the Playstation would be dead before TOCA 2 made it to the shelves.

"Well, no, that's not really the problem. It's not like the old days, when games machines were hugely different entities - now, everything essentially works the same way, and it's not all that difficult to switch platforms, even near the end of a game's development cycle. The reason backwards compatibility would be such good news for us is that it would, I think, ensure the success of the Playstation 2. It would make it such an easy way for people to move over - if they're faced, in a year or two's time, with the choice of two or three entirely different new machines, one of which plays all the old games they've invested so much money in and one of which doesn't, it's easy to see which represents the safest bet for them. But at the same time, they get to stay on the cutting edge. It's a confidence thing - it makes people feel they're not throwing their money away on a toy. Also, the number of games available is one of the major factors in people deciding between games platforms - it's almost certainly what's stopped the N64 taking off - and if you've got the whole PS back catalogue onboard, that's a big advantage."

So the development community seems to be pretty onboard. But then you'd expect that. They invest huge amounts of money in development kits and suchlike, not to mention many man-years of work on what might, at the end of it all, turn out to be a Saturn game (ie a complete waste of everyone's time and money). You can see why they'd want to reduce the risk. But what about an area of the business that traditionally does better than almost anyone out of new hardware? Magazine publishing thrives on the hype and buzz of the new and fashionable, and, being able to move a lot faster than games development, doesn't have a problem with resource management - if someone can write, they can switch from writing about the SNES to writing about the Playstation without even breaking stride. So surely someone like Matt Bielby (soon to launch a big-budget multi-format mag at Future) would have a vested interest in the constant turnover of new hardware?

"Backwards compatibility would be a great development, because we're aiming at a more grown-up, less diehard consumer, and to them, backwards compatibility moves games consoles away from the faddy kids toy image that they still, to an extent, have today, and more towards being a normal, everyday item of household consumer electronics like a VCR or a hi-fi system. Also, from our perspective, it'd be good to see something that allowed more scope for the development of true classics, in the conventional sense of the word. With other forms of leisure culture, you have timeless things - Citizen Kane, the first Clash album, whatever - that can still be easily bought by the consumer. It's not like that with games - sometimes you can get better versions of the same game lost in time, superceded by the inferior current incarnation. I think most people would agree, for example, that the SNES version of Bomberman was the best one ever."

The 10-player Saturn one, surely?

"Well, whatever. But if you want to play Bomberman nowadays, you have to play either the horrible N64 one - which is really a totally different game - or that nasty convoluted 3D-ish new Playstation one. It'd be so much better if you could still get the old version, probably at mid-price like you do with classic albums."

This last view is one that's also reflected by Jon Hare, still in the gloomy frame of mind seen in his recent CTW interview.

"What really depresses me is the fact that we've had 10 hit games, and practically none of them are played any more, because the formats are dead. What's the point in making a classic game? There's zero point. 'Classic' means timeless, in the games business, timeless is three years. Imagine if they'd changed the entire English language after Shakespeare finished "Hamlet".