I simply could not get to sleep last night. No matter which direction I pointed my mind, I could not turn it off.

After lying there listening to the traffic for a couple of hours, I started thinking back on games I've played over the years, and how they made me feel. One of my earliest gaming memories is playing Super Grand Prix on the Master System when I was about eight. I always used to look at the city that was shown in the distance during a race, and think "wow, how great would it be if the game let you drive through the actual city!" I can also remember being blown away by Zelda: Link's Awakening on the ol' Game Boy. This is the first time that I ever played a JRPG, and I recall being blown away by the size and scope of the game world, and that I could just wander off and chat to the world's inhabitants.

Its kinda weird now to think of how much for granted we take these things. To publish a racing game nowadays that only featured the occasional roadside lampost or tree would be inexcusable, but back then was the best we could get. And as for open world game arenas, I think I would have died from joy if you showed the ten year old me GTA 4 or Zelda: Wind Waker.

It also got me thinking; what should we expect ten years from now? We are now four generations of console on from my old Master System (still going strong, btw!), and game quality and immersion levels have gone up constantly, as have development times. Its not uncommon now for a big name game to take two or more years to be developed. The lifespan of consoles is widely cited as only five years. Could we end up with titles that take longer to develop than the lifespan of the console it is developed for?

Bloody hell, time for me to shut up! Incidentally, I never finished this train of thought last night. It sent me to sleep