It wasn't always like this you know. Star Wars: Episode I: The Phantom Menace is about to burst on to the big screen, and every major gaming format is being blessed with an 'official' Star Wars game/print studio/animated storybook/educational tie-in which some hapless publisher has paid through the nose to tag the logo onto. But there was a time when software publishers were rather more casual in adapting content from other media into games.

Perhaps, in the normally ever-litigious eyes of copyright and brand owners, computer games companies were too insignificant to bother suing, but many early software houses would unilaterally turn a successful film, coin-op or board game into binary format and publish the results. The names would be slightly changed (hey, even software publishers aren't totally stupid) but they wouldn’t be that different from the source, so we all knew what we were getting. Yes, compared to today, it does sound like a practice that happened in a far away galaxy, long ago, but this week 16 years ago saw two fine examples of this, er, pirating by software publishers.

By coincidence, both publishers chose a famous board game to rip, sorry, base a computer game on; Rabbit Software released a Commodore 64 implementation and Automata brought out a Spectrum version and their names were Monopole and Automonopoli respectively. Can you guess what they were yet? Both games picked up glowing reviews, with no mention of the legal transgressions that they represented, and everyone was happy: the sun was always shining, you could leave your front door unlocked and your windows open overnight, NATO didn’t bomb hospitals, you could understand the words of songs that were in the charts and… oh sorry. So, who else is disappointed that the new N64 Star Wars Racer game is only one or two-player?