Welcome, chums, to the last Panel 4 of the millennium. It’s been an event-packed million years for videogames. But what can we expect in the next million?

Wooh! Poodle rockin’!

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At the start of the last millennium, a million years ago, video games were at a very rudimentary stage. Fossils recently uncovered by archaeologists have revealed that, at least in certain backward regions of the planet, there weren’t even any FIFA games yet.

(Tomb Raider’s control system, on the other hand, had already been in existence for centuries.)

The nearest thing most cavemen had to a PC was a big jagged rock. Lucky them.

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A million years ago, orc-filled dungeons were still a popular setting for games, though of course at the time such plots were considered the height of crazy futuristic science fiction.

And even in those pre-language times, study of cave paintings has revealed that the games still went under portentous, pompous Spod Game titles full of unnecessary punctuation, like the timeless classic "Ug Ug: Ug Ug-ugg ugg Ug II". (A Doom clone with lots of very brown graphics, incidentally.)

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In the dark, dinosaur-filled Earth of a millennium ago, the highly primitive technology didn’t stop our ape-like ancestors from becoming embroiled in format wars. Barely an era went by without one tribe brutally attacking another over who had the best wheel, or whose rock started fires quickest.

(Although DNA fragments retrieved from sedentary rock appear to suggest that all of these tribes died out early in the millennium, having been too stupid to survive even a mild winter frost.)

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But of course, time and evolution soon marched on, leaving the weakest from the gene pool behind and striding boldly into a new age.

Even as early as 500,000 BC, historians believe that the basic blueprint of today’s modern fighting games were already in place, including auto-blocking, air combos and doing a little quarter-circle joypad rotation to throw a fireball. (Though back then, the joypad was a twig and the fireball a flaming lump of mammoth meat.)

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But as the millennium wore on through the ages, and the species we now recognise as the human race began to take shape, video games also changed, and as we all know, in the year 4,000 BC, Nolan Bushnell invented the first videogame, Pong.

(Actually, he invented Soul Calibur first, but dismissed it as being far too simple.)

For the next 6,000 years, nothing very much happened.

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Which brings us right up to the present day, and the very pinnacle of videogame design. And we’ve certainly come a long way in the last million years, as anyone who’s played Superman on the N64 will tell you.

But what can we look forward to in the next million-year millennium, as we cruise around our moon cities in our hovercars wearing our silver jumpsuits? Let’s take a little look into the games release schedules for the first months of the space year 2000, shall we?

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"Gran Turismo 2. Resident Evil 3. Die Hard Trilogy 2. Battlezone 2. Asteroids 64. Fighting Force 2. Street Fighter Alpha 3. Delta Force 2. International Track And Field 2. MDK 2. Dark Reign 2. WWF – Smackdown. Half-Life Team Fortress 2. Pokemon Yellow."

"Star Trek – Armada. Star Trek – First Contact. Star Trek – Voyager."

"NFL 2000. Madden 2000. NBA Live 2000. NBA Jam 2000. NHL 2000. NHL Breakaway 2000. NFL Quarterback Club 2000."

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But I’m sure the next millennium won’t be as bad as all that. After all, you, the games buyers, have shown that you demand more than sequels and clones.

You want original, clever, exciting games too, not just endless rehashes of FIFA, Tomb Raider and Championship Manager. Why, just look at the charts for the last four years!

Oh.