In 1994, Return Fire for the 3DO pioneered the use of "real" - albeit classical - music in a game, with Wagner's Ride Of The Valkyrie, although it wasn't until the birth of PlayStation and Psygnosis's Wipeout that real pop music in games became common. From then on it's been a struggle to keep pop stars out of the games industry's garden. Aerosmith swapped guitars for joysticks in Revolution X; Queen had their own Tomb Raider rip-off in The Eye; Peter Gabriel insisted on reinventing the pop video with assorted large-scale interactive fiascos; and Iron Maiden took the unprecedented step of including an extremely poor shoot 'em up as part of their high-profile greatest hits album. Even arch technophile David Bowie is getting in on the act, providing a host of new songs for Eidos's Omikron, while appearing in the game himself - both as he is today and as he was as a young man - in digitised form.

Someone who knows all about real music in games is the mono-titular Miles, formerly a top A&R man who had the dubious honour of signing Shampoo and Bis. Aside from being a committed games freak himself, Miles - along with Norman Cook's manager Garry Blackburn - has formed his own company, A.I., specifically to put together game soundtracks from scratch. His recent work includes the music for Gran Turismo 2 for Sony, incorporating tracks from the Cardigans and Fatboy Slim, and Urban Chaos from Eidos, featuring Basement Jaxx and Photek. How does he go about selecting the tracks?

"If they get me involved at an early stage of development I can put a complete soundtrack together to create an extra atmosphere that I think suits the game," he sort of reveals."This is done with lots of consultation with the producer, publisher and developer to create an overall sound. Sometimes this leads to lots of different styles of music in a game and sometimes it's genre specific."