The average age of a video game customer now hovers around the late twenties to early thirties. The variation on either side of that average reveals a fascinating picture, too. Many of the first generation of child gamers now approaching their forties have children of their own. Whole families now gather around a game console, just as in previous generations the family gathered to watch a video or Morecambe & Wise on TV or to play Monopoly together.

If you don't play videogames, you may consider this whole revolution irrelevant to you. The videogame industry - and stock market investors - disagree. The incredible strength of shares in companies such as Nintendo isn't a reflection of their present success; it's an expression of the market's belief that this industry still has an enormous amount of room to grow. Not slow annual growth as new consumers join today's ageing “gamer generations” - but the explosive growth that comes when everyone is converted to playing video games.

In the mid-Nineties, Sony began promoting the PlayStation in nightclubs rather than on children's TV. Game creators realised that it was young men, not schoolboys, who had become their primary consumers - a revelation that created a wave of action, crime and horror titles aimed at men in their twenties. Overnight, the industry added Grand Theft Auto and Resident Evil to a line-up previously dominated by child-friendly characters such as Mario and Sonic The Hedgehog. That was the first revolution in videogames.