Computer games are a serious business: the retail market for them in Ireland alone is worth over £15 million a year, and users are getting younger each year.
"Our target market has actually changed in the last number of years," says Michael Finucane of the Gamesworld retail chain. "It has generally dropped in age, largely because of the drop in price of the various consoles around such as the Sony Playstation. The main buyers can now be literally anyone from age 12 upward.
"The higher PC-based end of the market tends to be a bit older, though. It costs about £2,000 for a top-of-the-range PC that has all the extras, such as 3D cards and a Pentium 200 MHz MMX processor, so it's an expensive hobby for most teenagers.
The most popular games machine in Ireland is the Sony Playstation, of which around 50,000 units have been sold. "It is very much a growing market though, and the peaks and troughs of a couple of years ago are steadying out," Finucane says. The Playstation is now a more profitable and important product line for Sony than the legendary Walkman.
Funcom is a Norwegian games development company that employs 22 people in Clonskeagh, Dublin. Its main productions have been for the console market, primarily for the Sega Saturn and the Sony Playstation, with titles including Pocahontas, Casper The Friendly Ghost, NBA Hangtime, Impact Racing and Dragonheart.
"The games industry will be very interesting to follow for the next few months, especially coming up to Christmas, as a lot of British companies are in trouble and are relying heavily on their coming titles," says Ulrik Henriksen, vice-president of Funcom's product development division in Dublin.
Most blockbuster new releases are released in the period coming up to Christmas, the traditional boom period for games sales. This year, though, the the biggest sellers are likely to be sequels, such as Quake II, Jedi Knight and Tomb Raider II. According to Funcom, a good game is primarily one that features good game-play. It's not enough to have spectacular rendered graphics and a brilliant soundtrack - if the game plays like a wet Sunday afternoon, then it won't sell.
Like others, Henriksen sees the Internet as having the potential to revolutionise the game-playing industry. While it is technically already possible to play multiplayer games over the Net, prohibitive phone costs have generally hampered their popularity.
"When everybody has their own Internet connection into their house, it will be much more practical. At the moment, the technology and the infrastructure aren't there yet, but that is only a matter of time," he says. "We will have separate lines into our houses for the Internet, unconnected to conventional phone lines, allowing for faster speeds and lower costs. It is only a matter of short few years until the majority of people in Ireland have Internet connections anyway."
The first major title the company plans to publish online is a multi-player Net-based role-playing game called Anarchy. Players can either download the necessary software or (more conveniently due to its size) purchase it on CD-Rom. The appeal for players of networked games is the ability to play real people instead of computer-generated baddies.
Whereas other games with networking capabilities such as Duke Nukem 3d or Quake are primarily single player games that can be networked, Anarchy has been designed specifically for the Net.
"It's more comparable to a Multi-User Dungeon (MUD) type game than something like Quake, but it won't operate off a Web page. It will have a separate attractive interface. The advantages of this type of game is that it can be upgraded or changed very easily, without the player having to go out and buy a new copy."
Beta versions of Funcom's first test multi-player online title - a Java version of backgammon - can be downloaded at http:// www.funcom.com
Alex Meehan is at: alexm.iol.ie