IN THE YEAR 1998: We saw that despite headline optimism brought on by ever-growing revenues, the majority of publishers operating in the games business were still failing to make any money, and in some cases were losing eight-figure sums.

IN THE YEAR 1999: For the last two or three years now, the figurehead of the modern games business has been bosomy adventuress Lara Croft. Her three escapades have all been No.1 smashes, she’s had unprecedented real-world media coverage, and shifted millions of units. Lara’s owners, Eidos, also own the rights to Championship Manager (1997’s No.1 PC seller, and perhaps the third-strongest PC brand of all time, after Command & Conquer and Quake), and to football wunderkind Michael Owen.

What manner of diabolical devilment, then, is at work when Eidos have just posted yet another colossal loss, this time £18.9 million in six months? (Actually UP on this time last year, despite healthy continuing sales for twice as many TR titles as in 1997.) By my off-the-top-of-the-head reckoning (so do correct me if I’m wrong), Eidos have now posted similar losses for the last five half-years running (appearing in the black only once, briefly last March), for an apparent cumulative loss somewhere around £50 million. (And where the heck is this bottomless pit of cash coming from, anyway?)

At the same time, steady old Interplay somehow managed to haemorrhage £9 million in a single quarter, and disappeared up to their cheeks in borrowing. In last year’s feature, Virgin were going nowhere, Sega were cost-cutting in frantic desperation, Telstar were still waiting to make any kind of impact and Psygnosis were all over the place with redundancies ahoy... plus ca change. This might be a billion-pound industry, but don’t get excited - unless you’re EA, Sony or Nintendo, chances are you’ll never see any of it.

IN 1998: We bemoaned the death of interaction, in the wake of the success of highly linear games like Final Fantasy VII, Blade Runner and Broken Sword 2. Was this the return of the "interactive movie", we pondered.

IN 1999: We can look back on a year when, thankfully, gameplay has made a bit of a comeback. Zelda, Resident Evil 2, Gran Turismo, Tekken 3, Colin McRae, Banjo Kazooie – "proper" games all. Originality? You want the moon on a stick, you do.

IN 1998: We saw a depressing attempt to artificially force the standard street price of PC games up from £30 to £35.

IN 1999: Amazingly, after years of shouting and screaming into deaf ears from the likes of your correspondent, the business finally, agonisingly slowly, appears to be grasping the fact that prices are too high. In CTW’s end-of-year retailer survey, the clear favourite price of retailers for new PC titles was £30, with 37 per cent of the vote. Even more encouraging, though, was the fact that the second most-favoured price point, with 18 per cent, was the boldly dramatic £20. (Votes for £35 had shrivelled to a paltry 6 per cent.) All we need now is some action to back up the words. Two positive moves in a row? I’m getting giddy.

IN 1998: We were drowning in a sea of unimaginative Command & Conquer clones.

IN 1999: Phew. Normal service is resumed. Please, stop them now.

IN 1998: PAL conversions were rubbish, forcing gamers into the twilight world of chipping and protection-evading devices.

IN 1999: Slow progress continues to be made on this front, with the same guilty parties as before still being the ones responsible for most of the shoddy cut-and-shut jobs with the huge black borders and slow running speeds. Sadly, they’re also the companies responsible for bringing most of the big Japanese titles over here in the first place. Aren’t you, Virgin and Namco?

IN 1998: PC game boxes were stupid, huge, ugly, tatty things that took up ludicrous amounts of shelf space both in the shops and in the homes.

IN 1999: Does someone have shares in cardboard or something? Nothing whatsoever has changed here, except that almost a third of respondents in the CTW retailer survey now don’t stock PC software at all. It’s not difficult to see why – in my local Electronics Boutique, PC software sells less than anything else, yet takes up twice the space of everything else put together. With all the different sizes and styles and ranges of packaging, looking at the PC shelves is a horrible, messy, disorientating experience which makes it near-impossible for customers to find the game they’re actually looking for. Compared to the neat, orderly, friendly PS and N64 displays, it’s a miracle anyone ever manages to buy a PC game at all. People want CDs to be sold in CD boxes. End of story. For Christ’s sake sort it out, you muppets.

IN 1998: The standards of investigative journalism were awful, with features as often as not consisting of developers being given free and unquestioning rein to parrot pages and pages of press releases straight into print.

IN 1999: Ho hum.

IN 1998: Magazines were appalling sexist drivel, and served no useful purpose as buyer’s guides for either retail or consumers, reviewing practically every game ever released as "above average".

IN 1999: Vile, woman-hating trash like Playstation Plus still sells, but gratuitous tits in general seem to be on the way out (for the lads), with only the lower-rent Playstation mags and PC Format still being bastions of breasts for breasts’ sake. Sadly, the trend towards toothless, pointless reviewing is if anything growing, reaching a nadir in December when a round-up of multi-format mags showed three Future titles combining to inform their readers that 83 games that month had been "above average", with just 3 rating "below average". Maths teachers everywhere sobbed into their real ale. As did advice-seeking potential game buyers.

IN 1998: All major hardware and software companies except Sony stood accused of spectacularly useless PR where the real-world was concerned, lavishing money on beer-drenched parties at the expense of actually sending people review copies to write about.

IN 1999: Twelve months on, it appears that, rather shockingly, people STILL haven’t learned anything from Sony’s incredibly successful PS strategies. Playing lead Scrooge again were THE/Nintendo with a mindbogglingly short-sighted/arrogant/cheapskate policy which meant you were lucky if you were allowed to brush up against an empty Zelda box for 30 seconds the day before it was released. (Being regularly sent five identical press releases about a game or piece of hardware that you weren’t allowed to actually see added insult to injury.) After a brief period of enlightenment, Sega also relapsed into incompetence. At the Japanese launch of Dreamcast – exactly the time you’d want to start building up brand awareness and suchlike to prepare for the European rollout, just as Sony did – Sega incredibly didn’t even have an operational PR office in this country (and apparently, don’t plan to for another four months yet). Having been asked to do a huge cover feature on Sonic for a major newsstand publication, I called Sega up for some background info, eventually managing to talk to one harassed-sounding bloke who promised to get back to me straight away. Six weeks and no huge cover features later, I’m still waiting for the phone to ring. Still, it’s only a mass market – who wants it?

IN 1998: PC games were still being aimed at a microscopically small percentage of the available market, on account of their demanding unrealistic hardware specs to run properly. Bless my innocence, I was shocked at a few games requiring as much as 150MB of hard disk space for their minimum install.

IN 1999: Today, of course, it’s not at all uncommon to find games requesting anything up to 600MB of space before they’ll consent to run at all, and that’s assuming you’ve got at least a Pentium 2 with 64MB of memory, a Voodoo 2 graphics card and – for God’s sake – NOT Windows 98 as your OS. (I’ve now attempted to install 14 games on my own PC since "upgrading" – at the time, seemingly seamlessly - to Win98, including three new Microsoft titles, without a single success.) This is such a self-evidently ridiculous and stupid state of affairs that I can’t even be bothered getting angry about it any more. PC games publishers – go bust. See if I care.

IN 1998: "Online gaming – it’s (still) the future! Like it was last year. And will be next year. And the year after that. Online gaming is shit, and always will be. End of story. Can we get on now?"

IN 1999: See above.

IN 1998: We bemoaned the lack of any national terrestrial mainstream games coverage on television. We even suggested an effective, practical and extremely affordable plan to pro-actively change the situation. Alternatively, we suggested sitting around moaning about it some more and seeing if that worked.

IN 1999: Yes, I do get tired of being right all the time, since you ask.