A couple of weeks ago I went to the "Game On" exhibition at the Barbican Centre in London. It's a temporary shrine to all that's ever been wonderful and ground-breaking in the video games world.

And this really is going back to basics, with the original tennis game, Pong, shown on a giant screen opposite the entrance. It took us a while to get past this, at which point we were hooked for ages on a selection of original arcade games, in their decades-old cabinets with worn joysticks and on-the-blink screens. Asteroids, Galaxians, Centipede, Space Invaders, Pac-Man, Donkey Kong and other classics: it was like going back in time 20 years to the chip shops/pubs/amusement arcades of days gone by.

Wandering on a little further we came to the early 8-bit home computers from the likes of Sinclair, Commodore and Acorn (some of which were not actually plugged in, but running as emulations on a PC). Then the dedicated games consoles, including PlayStation, X-Box, Megadrive, Super NES and the like.

There were some omissions - I couldn't find Doom or SimCity 2000 and Elite should really have been running on a Beeb - but that's inevitable given the hundreds of thousands of games that have been around since the dawn of computers.

Aside from the fact that it's a great exhibition and you should go if you have the chance (it's on until September), there's a point to all this. Most of the interest was around the simple old arcade games. This wasn't just nostalgia - kids who weren't even born when Defender was the game were belting the buttons like demons, egged on by their reminiscing dads. Yet the PlayStation 2 and X-Box upstairs were often left unused. The older games really were more popular.

Perhaps it's because the lack of processing power at the time meant that programmers had to concentrate on gameplay rather than graphics. Perhaps it's because the games don't last long (after all, the point was to extract your pocket money as quickly as possible), so it's easier to play the older games with a group of friends. Perhaps it's because we have such short attention spans. Perhaps it's because the controls are so easy to understand. Whatever the reason, the classic games seem to endure.

So, assuming you haven't already got hold of an emulator or repackaged arcade classics for your PC, Gameboy, PlayStation or mobile phone, do a quick Web search for MAME (Multi Arcade Machine Emulator) and prepare to relive your youth. Or, if you're still young, to find out what you missed.