I don't recall a single new release dropping through my door in January 1999, which is a little alarming as you can normally at least guarantee half-a-dozen big titles that slipped and missed Christmas and are making a desperate stab at damage limitation by mopping up the granny money. So what happened this year, and was it just a fluke or a symptom of something a little more serious? Time to get out the special investigating hat.

Looking back, the first thing you notice about the Christmas 98 season is how short on big-name blockbusters it was. Apart from Zelda (which, of course, managed to shoot itself fairly badly in the foot anyway), it's hard to recall a December with fewer big exciting titles in it. In 1998, all the money was behind second sequels. Crash Bandicoot, Tomb Raider, Cool Boarders, Actua Soccer and Tekken all had a big "3" on the end of their names, Formula 1 had it in all but title, while FIFA saw 3 incarnations just in the space of the year. And despite punters spending more money on games than ever before, none of the second sequels reached the heights of the previous games in their respective series. TR3 spent just seconds at the top of the charts, F1 '98 took a kicking both critically and commercially, the third Tekken saw itself easily overhauled by its Platinum-priced predecessor, and Actua Soccer 3, despite great reviews, (does anybody in the world except magazine journalists actually like Actua Soccer?), troubled Chart-Track's compilers not at all, currently failing to show face even in the lowest and most unfashionable reaches of the All-Formats Top 40 and surely having a significant part to play in Gremlin's recent financial difficulties.

Even more worryingly, there are precious few triple-As on the 1999 horizon. Nintendo have finally completed the N64's "launch" roster, and have nothing much in the pipeline. All of their most famous properties have now been exploited, and the only faint possibility (a Super Mario sequel) apparently hasn't even been started, with Shigeru Miyamoto off taking a well-earned holiday. (And farming the Mario franchise out to third parties to produce weird board games, bizarre beat-'em-ups and golf titles isn't going to fool anyone.) On the Playstation, everyone's trying to get excited about Metal Gear Solid which, smashing though it is, is a 1998 game. Sony's hopes for the first quarter are pinned on Ridge Racer 4, a third sequel and a racing game to boot. Dreamcast's launch flagship will be Virtua Fighter 3, already attracting murmurs of boredom from early adopters for being essentially just Virtua Fighter 2 in slightly nicer clothes. And on PC, breath long held in anticipation of Quake 3 and Daikatana is being swiftly let out as the games look more and more like Quake Yet Again and Quake But Grey respectively. And of course there's always Tiberian Sun, yet another second sequel. Anyone see a pattern emerging yet?

For all the talk of the industry now being too mature for the boom-and-bust cycles of the old days, there can be little doubt that 1999's looking like a bit of, if not a winter of discontent, then certainly an autumn of slight depression. These must surely be the dying gasps of the "next generation" machines - Sony can't hold out forever in the face of technological leaps from the Dreamcast and PC, and it's all but impossible to imagine Nintendo nursing the sickly N64 - still being outsold in Japan by even the Saturn - through another 12 months with no more Miyamoto epics waiting in the wings. The PC, of course, is already heading for the critical list in games terms, with almost a third of UK games retailers now not bothering to stock PC titles at all, and who can blame them? These days, the minimum hardware specs to run a PC game become obsolete in the time between customers buying a game and downloading the patch that makes the damn thing work properly. The resurgent Game Boy may well turn out to be the only thing that keeps a roof over many retailers' heads, and how alarming would that be?

Despite all the lessons of history, then, it appears that we're looking at something of an imminent hatch-battening, bubble-bursting scenario (though at least, chances are this time it'll be more of a deflation than an outright bang). But why? Well, the creative bankruptcy outlined above certainly has something to do with it. However much they tend to go for the "more of the same" approach, the public does have a limited attention span, which has been pushed pretty much to its limits by each of the titles listed. (After all, how many successful "4"s - or even "3"s, come to that - can you think of in any field of popular culture, never mind games?) The mainstream gamer hasn't actually shown any sign of growing weary of the Playstation itself, but there was a palpable air of disaffection at the dismal range of new software available last Christmas. It's as if the games business was actively trying to make people feel it was time to move on to new hardware.

(I'll digress for a moment here, because it's an interesting situation. For years and years now, the business has made its money out of selling the same things over and over again, only in sexy new 3D/32-bit/64-bit/million-polygon/whatever incarnations. You didn't need exciting new ideas, because you could just repackage the old ones with fantastic technological resprays just as the public started to get bored of the old models. The long lifespan of the Playstation has thrown all the old equations out of step, and no-one quite seems to know what to do about it.)

But this time, the whole new hardware thing, traditionally the industry's cure-all remedy, isn't quite as simple as it used to be. Arcade editor Neil West recently made the interesting observation that, contrary to received wisdom, Sony actually can't afford to announce any concrete details about Playstation 2 yet, because the original is still doing so phenomenally well that to hasten its obsolesence (or more accurately, the public perception of its obsolesence) would be commercial insanity.

And it's a sound point, except that Sony might well end up having the decision made for them. Talk to developers, and you'll find that practically no-one is starting to make new Playstation games any more. With an average 18-month development period, it's no surprise - it's all but inconceivable that the new machine won't be out or extremely imminent by then, and who wants to be pouring all their resources into developing for yesterday's hardware? Games developers don't work that way, for good or ill they always want to be playing with the newest toys available. And as we've already seen, in PS development the sun actually died some time ago - even the rays of weak, play-it-safe, second-sequel light we're seeing now mostly started their journeys a year ago and more. Sony can't afford to let the public go cold on the PS brand thanks to a lack of any decent new software, so they have to strike with the follow-up while the iron is hot, which leaves them with a paradox. (Unless... no, let's not bring up backwards compatibility again.) You can understand why they aren't worried about the Dreamcast (Sega's chances of making a serious impact with it can't - let's not kid ourselves here - be rated as anywhere above "extremely slim"), but the PS's success may yet prove to be the company's own biggest threat.

So where does this all leave us? It leaves us with no blockbusting N64 games at all to look forward to (even Rare's forthcoming clutch of great-looking titles are likely to appeal to diehard gamers rather than the mass market), precious few Playstation ones, an increasingly struggling PC market and no prospect of Dreamcast until the last quarter. And even there, there's currently precious little to get excited about - aside from the three "major" launch games already out (Virtua Fighter Again, Sega Rally Again and Sonic's Fast-But-Shallow Platform Adventure Again, But In 3D This Time), there's practically nothing currently pencilled in on Dreamcast that'll capture the general public's imagination (unless you think they're going to be kicking down your doors for House Of The Dead 2).

And that's, of course, if it ever comes out here at all. (I notice that nobody's taken me up on my bet of several weeks ago - there's still easy money to be made if you doubt my suspicion that the DC will come out here either well in advance of the currently-suggested September, or never. Usual address.) Meanwhile, everyone in the business hangs about in limbo waiting for official PS2 news and the huge momentum built up over the last few years leaks away as the public are expected to fork out their cash for nothing more than another half-dozen marginally tweaked EA Sports games ("This time, we've added realistic spitting animations"), Actua Soccer 4 ("This time, the Scotland kit is only 9 months out of date. God, we're useless."), Need For Speed 6 ("This time, er, it's the same"), Formula 1 '99 ("This time, we've put back all the things that were in F1 '97 that we took out the last time and screwed it all up"), or, God help us all, Cool Boarders 5 ("This time, it's very nearly almost half-playable.") for an entire year.

You know, one day we're going to push them all too far.