Viewers, I have a confession to make. I’ve spent most of this week shut away in a bedroom, feverishly doing something I haven’t done since I was about 15.

It’s something that’s exhausting yet deeply satisfying, it’s intensely addictive (once you’ve started it becomes a compulsion that’s hard to stop) and something millions of young people used to do in their bedrooms an awful lot, but the practice has rather faded away in recent years and I think it’s a real shame. I’m talking, of course, about programming a videogame.

If you’re under the age of 20 or so, you’ll probably be barely familiar with the concept of pinball. Once the leading-edge form of hi-tech entertainment for young people, pinball was dealt a massive body blow by the invention of the videogame, and from the late 70s and early 80s on, the form suffered a slow and protracted death until finally, last year, legendary pinball company Williams (also the people who brought you great videogames like Defender and Robotron 2084) closed the door on its pinball division for the last time and all but ended world pinball production. (Only a couple of new pinball tables are released a year now, and you’re extremely lucky if you know of anywhere you can actually go and play one.)

Ironically, having done more than anything else to kill pinball, videogaming is now leading the movement to revive it, via Visual Pinball. A freeware PC program created by Randy Davis (www.randydavis.com/vp), Visual Pinball is a 3D pinball construction program that enables you to precisely recreate real-life pinball tables from any era in history from the 1930s right up to the present day. Even the most modern tables can be recreated right down to their music and dot-matrix displays, with the incorporation into VP of an offshoot of the famous arcade emulator MAME and the help of websites like www.hippie.net/shivasite which archive rulebooks and playfield graphics of old tables, but you can also use the program to create your own totally original tables.

So last week, that’s what I decided to do, and I ended up not getting to bed before 3am for seven days in a row. It was just like being 15 again.

Even right into the 1990s, computer gaming was still essentially the preserve of bedroom coders. It was only when the 16-bit formats (Amiga, Atari ST and the modern PC) came to prominence that games stopped being created by one or two people largely on their own and started to become huge affairs with enormous budgets and dozens of people all fighting to get their artistic vision to the forefront. 

In many ways it was the start of the malaise in modern gaming that’s so often felt to exist by anyone who was around before the 16-bit era, because it was the death knell for the purity and coherence of design that comes from a game being created solely by one person. The more people you get involved in any one project, the more edges tend to get knocked off it and the more likely you are to turn out a polished but bland piece of software that’s all but identical to a hundred others released the same year.

It’s also one of the unspoken driving forces behind the principle of emulation as a whole. Emulation isn’t just a nostalgia thing, it’s also one of the few outlets for a creative mind in gaming these days, since it’s something that one person can do, yet produces results that thousands will actually want to play. And programming is a hugely creative process, with all the consequences that entails. One minute you’ll be bashing your head off the desk and screaming “WHY! WON’T! YOU! WORK?” at your PC screen, and the next minute you’ll have a flash of inspiration, and a bit of genius lateral thinking suddenly gives you a way around the problem and you get a rush of achievement-fuelled adrenalin that’ll keep you going right through the next four hours of infuriating bugs.

You should try it, viewers. VP uses Visual Basic, a coding language that’s powerful yet extremely easy to get to grips with. I started with zero knowledge, and built my whole table in a week. And if you do get stuck, the forums at Shivasite are full of people who’ll be happy to help you out, a roll call now proudly including me.

Oh, and I nearly forgot. My table - The Great Rock’n’Roll Swindle - can be found at http://www.hippie.net/shivasite/files/special/tgrrs11.zip. Only love can set you free, chums.