While overall game sales were up, gamers didn't necessarily benefit all of the time. As time went on, the inevitable tendency of advertisers to tell... well, porkies sprang occasionally to the fore. Does the sound of a beat 'em up featuring cool robots, a spanking soundtrack by a rock legend, groundbreaking graphics and unrivalled revolutionary gameplay get you tripping to the shops? It certainly got lots of incautious people doing just that, and it was called Rise of the Robots. Many crusty old gamers will be nodding wisely at the moment and can be firmly divided into those who swallowed the hype and were shafted and those who waited for the suspiciously late game reviews and breathed a huge sigh of relief. The ad campaign was huge and very slick, with posters, TV ads and celebrity endorsements. But this ad campaign can only be described as a tissue of lies and is the most scandalous example of such in videogaming history. Other average-at-best games sell solely on the back of marketing. Formula 1 98 was an even bigger load of pants than Vanessa Feltz's laundry and consistently reviewed poorly, yet it sold remarkably well on the reputation of its forbears and some very hard-hitting magazine, poster and TV ads.

Would Tomb Raider 4 sell less well than is inevitable, even were it to get review scores of 40 per cent? I think not. Image is everything these days, and computer games have fallen under the same spell with ease. Lara Croft is cool, rivalling Mario and Sonic for instant recognition. This is a licence to print money, and if the games are good, who loses? Sadly, a game that is good and deserves success now faces such a huge marketing bill to have a chance of succeeding that the corporate boys have moved in. Shareholders don't care one bit about development, good or bad games, necessary slippage for further development, etc. Most don't even understand the business they have shares in. What they do care about is rapid profit.

Marketing is the grease that oils the wheels in the great money-making machine, so I guess we're stuck with it. If you have to tell a few fibs to shift your game, so be it. In the future, even more than now if present trends continue, the game with the largest advertising budget will succeed versus the best game on merit. We will all be poorer for that in the end. Games need marketing, but do gamers?