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Compared to cinema or recorded music, videogaming doesn't have a long history. Some argue that Space War heralded the birth of the medium as long ago as 1962, but videogames didn't really find their way into the public consciousness until the arrival of affordable consoles and home computers in the early 1980s. Unless you were lucky enough to have an arcade full of 10p-guzzling cabinets within easy reach of your home, it's likely that your first exposure to videogames was a chunky cartridge system from Atari or a home computer from Commodore or Sinclair Research.

As new and exciting as it all was, gaming was often dismissed during the 1980s as a juvenile activity for teenage boys, rather than something everyone could enjoy. These days, things have changed: gaming is mainstream, more popular than ever, and an industry as big as the movies. From the PlayStation to the amusingly named Wii and various handheld systems that give you, in the palm of your hand, more power than the PC-sized systems of the 1980s, we're spoiled for choice.

But those of us who remember an earlier age of joystick-twiddling often find something missing from today's gaming: imagination.

The good old days

Spiralling budgets have resulted in today's games mostly being cookie-cutter efforts, shoe-horned into dependable genres. Back in the 1980s, gaming was a free-for-all, with individual programmers and game designers stamping their personalities on wildly varied products. There was no effort to conform, because

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there was nothing to conform to, and an eager, dedicated audience was always keen to experience new things.

Innovation was rampant, and a less litigious environment led to many designers using popular titles as the basis for their own creations, before going off on wild and wacky tangents of their own. One well-known British designer in this area was Jeff Minter, who took Atari's Centipede - a vertical shoot-'em-up that tasked the user with defeating swarms of centipedes and spiders - and remade it as Grid Runner, an altogether tougher, spacier, more frenetic affair. Soon after, he 'borrowed' the premise behind The Empire Strikes Back on the Atari 2600, which concentrates on the sequence where the rebel Snowspeeders take on the giant AT-ATs, and replaced the foes with enormous camels.

Most importantly, fun was the order of the day: games were far simpler than today's efforts, with real pick-up-and-play, just-one-more-go values. Today, you get the feeling 'fun' is considered an f-word by an industry hell-bent on forcing gamers to endure lengthy, tedious tutorials and learn forty billion button combinations just to make their on-screen player kick a football. Seven-year-olds inevitably seem to pick all this up without thinking twice, but more mature brain cells don't reconfigure quite so easily. Sure, the cassettes you'd pick up for two quid in your local garage in the 1980s came with instructions, but no-one bothered to read them - they could have been in Latin and few would have noticed.

While games of yesteryear do tend to look and sound primitive, many nonetheless have plenty of charm and character. There's the delicate monochrome graphics of ZX Spectrum games, the unique, raucous and exciting sound of the Commodore 64's SID chip - still used by musicians today for chart-topping tracks - and the first tentative steps towards 3D gaming, most notably on Nintendo's SNES. And while it's true that you'd need to don thick rose-tinted glasses to believe all gaming was better in the old days, there's a purity and a level of experimentation in many classic titles that's since been lost.