The first week of September is traditionally when ECTS - Europe's biggest games trade show - hits town, and no doubt you'll be able to read about many of this year's successes elsewhere in this issue. In this column though, with the in-built benefit of hindsight - not to mention a certain degree of smugness - we have a tendency to feature the industry failures just as much as the successes. Which brings us neatly to 1995 and the Virtual iO headset. Yes, we're talking virtual reality which, perhaps fuelled by too much exposure to The Lawnmower Man, was gobbling up development costs at far too many companies at this particular point in the industry's development.

The Virtual iO headset was developed by the eponymously-named Virtual iO, an offshoot of Escom, and launched by the German company at ECTS. These were the days when Escom were still very big news. They had come over from Germany with their crappy own-branded PCs, bought the Rumbelows chain of shops, re-fitted them out in a rudimentary fashion as specialist computer stores, bought Commodore with a little loose change and were in the middle of an enormous 'The Man from Escom' marketing campaign, which was scaring the pants off other PC builders and independent computer dealers alike.

Targeted at 'committed, wealthy gamers', the headset came with head tracking capabilities and could display 2D video and 3D video footage, when appropriately encoded into the software. Virtual iO claimed to have the full commitment of leading publishers such as Microsoft, Electronic Arts and Virgin, and had an ambitious target of selling some 25,000 in the UK before Christmas, through both their own shops and other High Street chains.

According to John Smith, Escom's Sales Manager at the time, headset owners would have more than just games to play with: "In the US they are being used in dentists' waiting rooms to help patients relax. Immersive viewing also makes pornography a potentially humungous market, but we're also talking to more upmarket companies such as Lufthansa and Mercedes."

I was given one to play with for a few weeks and was astonished at the build quality and ease of use. (Are you expecting me to be complimentary about anything Escom? Relax...) Constructed of ill-fitting chunks of lightweight plastic, it proved impossible to get up and running, and after two failed attempts I returned the thing to its box and posted it back to them. I had to insure it though. The cost of the item was a piss-taking £899.

As a reasonably competent techie person who failed to get any results at all with it, I wondered at the time how 'committed' those 'wealthy gamers' would have to be to throw that sort of dosh at something that might not actually work first time. I needn't have worried, of course. Very few of them did.