It’s hard not to be suspicious of the furore surrounding the “BT incident” in The Getaway, which blew up recently, coincidentally just as the game’s chart performance started to flag.

For one thing, it’s difficult to imagine exactly what BT would think they were solving by kicking up a fuss. After all, their virtual engineer is only one of hundreds and hundreds of casualties in the game, and when you take his uniform and go on another killing spree, you’re just IMPERSONATING a BT engineer, not portraying one. No-one is trying to imply that actual BT engineers regularly go on kill-crazy rampages in high-security police stations, nor that you’re taking your life in your hands every time you try to get someone round to install your broadband cable. Frankly, the whole thing smells of a setup to The Man On The Street.

Nevertheless, The Getaway was by far 2002’s most interesting game. Not because of its endlessly-hyped “accurate” mapping of London, which at the end of the day was all mouth and no trousers (of the first 12 places The Man On The Street went cruising to look for, precisely none of them were in there, and in many cases even the roads they were on didn’t exist in the game), and certainly not because of its gameplay, which appeared to have been tacked on in about a fortnight at the end of the five-year development cycle. (Something’s gone badly wrong in the priorities department when you can spend years photographing buildings that nobody’s ever going to look at, but can’t be arsed to make sure the characters can’t walk through walls, or come up with a justification for a policeman wearing a short-sleeved shirt being able to sustain a dozen point-blank shotgun wounds with no ill-effects while flak-jacketed riot squad officers around him fall by the dozen from a couple of pistol shots.)

But The Getaway managed to achieve something that, to the best of The Man On The Street’s recollection, no other game has done in over 25 years of gaming. Which is to say, it managed to set your reporter pondering a moral issue. Whether it intended any such thing is entirely up for debate.

In pretty much every “story”-based videogame ever, the player takes the role of either an out-and-out hero whose morals and ethics are beyond reproach, or a cartoon baddie shamelessly trying to enslave the universe. In The Getaway, however, you play an ordinary man who, to rescue his kidnapped child, is prepared to slaughter hundreds of innocent people. (No matter that the kidnapper constantly identifies and incriminates himself over the phone, for example, and that a simple tape-recording delivered to the police would almost certainly secure the infant’s safe return. The Getaway’s plot is so full of such enormous gaping holes that picking on individual ones seems terribly unfair.)

It wasn’t until about three minutes in that The Man On The Street started thinking “Hey, I’m really not sure I want to be identifying with this guy” as he mowed down police and innocent passers-by alike with an assault rifle in the middle of Tottenham Court Road. And while, as moral dilemmas go, it’s not much of a head-scratcher (“Hmm, is the murder of hundreds of innocents to protect the life of one individual – who may well be dead anyway – justified? Tricky call.”), it’s nevertheless the first time this reporter has ever had ANY kind of examination of real-life moral issues sparked by a videogame. Which is, you have to suppose, a start of some sort.

Now, The Man On The Street hasn’t finished The Getaway yet (the control system being so violently unpleasant in the last couple of levels that your reporter gave up in sheer disgust rather than defeat), so apologies to Team Soho if these issues are miraculously and morally resolved at the end of the game, though it’s next to impossible to imagine how they could be. And we’ll casually skip over the fact that there are beyond a doubt tens of thousands of kids playing this game in spite of its 18 certificate, learning God alone knows what lessons from it in their impressionable young heads.

The Getaway - whether by design or, more likely, accident, and whether for good or ill - may well have just taken the first step in the long-heralded transformation of games into proper culture. Whether this marks a whole new direction for gaming, or whether it’s just a brief trip down a side street blocked off by a row of buildings that didn’t used to be there, is something we can only wait and see.