It's our first birthday, so we decided to take a look back over the past year, choosing the biggest news stories of each month for you to get all misty-eyed over...

November 5, 1998 - Issue 1

VM Labs are NUON the block

VM Labs, the developers of the latest interactive digital video entertainment standard formerly known as Project X, have finally settled on a name and logo for their baby.

NUON is to be the new technology's moniker, where according to word maker-uppers Lexicon, who came up with the tag, "The syllable 'NU' expresses the concept 'new', in the sense of 'innovative'. Meanwhile, the syllable 'ON' suggests 'on' in contrast to 'off'." The interactive digital video standard is, according to VM Labs' CEO Richard Miller, "...a technology capable of introducing millions of consumers to interactive entertainment through their television sets".

NUON is effectively some RAM and four processors combined on one chip. This turns it into a media processor capable of some 1.5 billion instructions per second, or 1,500 MIPS, which compares very favourably with the PlayStation's meagre 30 and Dreamcast's 360. This power gives NUON the ability to decode MPEG in real-time and create 3D graphics engines - polygon, ellipsoid and infinite plane - in software.

A number of DVD systems set to appear next year have NUON technology powering them and other partners working with VM Labs include Activision, Hasbro, Psygnosis and THQ.

So ran one of the week's 10 news stories in the first issue of Future Gamer, launched at The Playing Fields in London. We had no idea what we'd started...