As the market fell, many of the ambitious companies on which hopes for a digital revolution had been pinned were shown to be wearing little but the Emperor's New Clothes - they burned through their venture capital and went bust, many of them without ever managing to post an operating profit. With it went much of the optimism which had fuelled the games industry's predictions for the decade. By late 2002, kicked while it was down by the economic gloom created by the 9/11 attacks, it bottomed out at less than 20 per cent of its peak value. Within a year, the market was trading below 2500. On March 10, 2000, the technology-heavy NASDAQ index peaked at 5132 - the Matterhorn-like point of its curve looking, today, like the needle that pricked the dot-com bubble.
It's sobering to read back on enthusiastic editorials from December 1999 and to consider that for the games and wider technology and media industries, the end of the optimistic, bombastic 1990s was only mere weeks away. The culture of the nineties, the author argued, ended with stark finality on September 11, 2001. So, the hedonistic culture of the seventies only truly ended when the world woke up to the awful reality of HIV in 1983, while the greed-is-good eighties closed up shop early, with the fall of the Berlin Wall in late 1989. I read a commentary recently which suggested that decades never truly end on December 31st of their final year - rather, that they come to a close with resounding events which draw the curtain on the culture which has defined the decade. Such is reality, however, and the games industry cannot bear the brunt of the blame.