After some 18 months of planning, toy giant Hasbro announced this week that they were to enter the interactive entertainment industry. The firm's brands had previously been licensed out to other publishers, and Simon Bamford, the new boss of Hasbro Electronic Entertainment (now Hasbro Interactive), was rather scathing of these attempts: "There have been some awful products put out in our name in the past and, at best, anything that has been licensed out has only been of a reasonable standard."

Hasbro's first product was a curious beast called the Hyper Score. This £29.99 peripheral ran on SNES and Mega Drive and was basically a one-way modem, allowing users to send their high scores down a telephone line where, in conjunction with a national newspaper and Teletext, they would be entered into league tables. The hyper-critical Bamford was almost equally dismissive about this first toe in the water: "It's a good product, but more an exercise in marketing than a wonderful new piece of hardware." Most SNES and Mega Drive owners obviously agreed with this assessment.

November saw the first 'real' Hasbro effort - a CD-ROM version of Monopoly, developed by Westwood Studios, which was really rather good. Indeed, Intel were so impressed with it that they later used it in television advertising for their new range of Pentium processors.

Hasbro went on to release PC versions of just about all their board game properties: Sorry!, The Game of Life, Operation, Cluedo, Stratego, etc, and several tie-ins including both Star Wars and World Cup versions of Monopoly, with reasonable levels of success. They later used a little loose change from their deep pockets to buy the rights to everything owned by Atari (hardware and software) for around £50 million. The first fruit from this transaction was an updated version of Frogger, with the promise of many more enhanced classics to come.

It cost them a little more when they splashed out on MicroProse, although this immediately made Hasbro a major industry player, particularly with the success of Roller Coaster Tycoon and the Star Trek series that was also acquired in the purchase.

As I write this, Hasbro are talking to lifestyle and educational software specialists Europress, with a view to acquisition. From the Hyper Score to where they are now in four years is not bad going, and although having substantial cash reserves has obviously helped, the history of the industry is littered with big names from other areas who have come in, made a big noise, flashed the cash and ended up going away again with their tales (and very little else) between their legs...