Not so long ago, if you told people you played computer games you’d get a response that went something along the lines of "beard", "anorak" or "no-mates." I suffered years of merciless ribbing at school and college about it; two of my friends found out about live role-playing (nothing to do with me mind) and thought the concept so hilarious, they’d leap around hitting each other on the head with imaginary latex swords whilst shouting "Plus two! Plus two!" The inference was clear. I was irredeemably sad.

In the last two years the games industry in the UK has doubled in value and is now worth over a billion pounds. In terms of value, that puts it well above cinema and not far off the music and video industries. Inspired marketing by Sony and the huge success of the Playstation have given the industry a makeover worthy of Richard and Judy. How times have changed.

Last month I was invited to talk at the Milia show in Cannes. These are triumphant times for the industry, and nowhere was this more apparent then at Milia. One morning I was there I was suddenly struck by how fast everything’s changed. Cannes itself, the glitz and the fast cars - where did all this come from? More importantly, where’s it heading?

Alongside me on the panel at the show were Alex Garden (Relic), Ignacio Perez Dolset (Pyro) and Gavin Rummery (Core). Between them they’ve made Homeworld, Commandos and Tomb Raider II. To say I was nervous is an understatement. I needn’t have worried though, as you couldn’t meet three more down-to-earth people. Despite huge critical and commercial success, none of them appear to have lost the plot. Best of all, at heart they’re still all fellow gamers. Forget the fast cars and fit women; the real talk was about Zelda.

Alex Garden is hugely likeable and his story is cool one. When he was 15 he was working in a yoghurt shop. Dom Mattrick, now Vice President of EA, turned up in a black lambourghini. Alex basically said to him, ‘whatever you’re doing, take me with you.’ As a result, he got his first break in the industry as a tester. These days, still only 24, he has his own company (Relic) and is currently sitting on one of the hottest games of 1999 (Homeworld – one of the games I’m most excited about this year). We struck up a friendship and when he came to London recently, we went out for some beers at the Sports café in London.

Ignacio Perez Dolset is also very likeable and I think his story is very unusual. Before setting-up Pyro he ran a distribution company. As he tells it, having set-up Pyro with his brother, one day they realised they needed a designer so he decided to try his hand. The thing I found very interesting was that they made a board game version of Commandos to help in the design of the game. It’s a cool idea and it really focuses in on the gameplay at early stage. It’s also a relatively rare example of something that I’m always going on about, which is the need to look towards other types of games for inspiration. I think board games and traditional RPGs in particular are very under-rated by a lot of people in the industry. I think this approach can pay big dividends (particularly with regards to multiplayer) and this is apparent in the way Commandos plays. I love squad-based tactical games and I’ve done so since first playing Rebel Star on the Spectrum and then Laser squad on my old Amiga.

The last member of the panel was Gavin Rummery, who made Tomb Raider II. Despite having a PhD from Cambridge Gavin decided that academia wasn’t for him and opted for games instead. I think his experience is reflective of a pattern I’ve noticed more and more over the last couple of years. Where once they would have been swallowed up by the City to work on databases, increasingly the best academic programmers are coming to work in the games industry. And as the physics, AI and graphics in games become more sophisticated, academic training will become increasingly important. In fact, in many areas the games industry is in actually leading academia. Unfortunately I think the days of being able to hack up something up in your bedroom with a few mates are drawing to close.

We’ve really had our noses to the grindstone over the last two months. At various points throughout the development cycle a developer has milestones that are set by the publisher. If you fail to meet these satisfactorily you run the risk of defaulting on your publishing deal. Our first milestone was at the end of March and we wanted to not only pass it, but to do so well. Much of the relationship between a publisher and a developer is based on trust and so it meant a lot to us to get off to a good start with Eidos. In the event I think they were pleased with what we showed them. I did though face one unexpected hurdle, when Ian Livingstone discovered our new table football table and challenged me to a match. Ian’s no mean player – he is rumoured to have been Hull University doubles champion with Steve Jackson – but what a terrible situation to put me in. Good business sense should have prevailed here. A battling defeat at the hands of Eidos’s Chairman (in the face of the superior table-footballing skills) would’ve been just the ticket. You’ve got to draw the line somewhere though; a game is a game after all. I won 6 – 3.

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