Pokémon gold
Like best-selling music discs, videogames can now win gold, silver and platinum discs for sales in the UK. The Volume Sales Awards have been organised by Elspa (European Leisure Software Publishers Association) and are based on individual format sales monitored by ChartTrack UK.

Titles need to shift 100,000 units to go silver, 200,000 units for gold and 300,000 units for the platinum award.

The first two platinum awards have just been presented for Sony's Gran Turismo 2 and Electronic Arts's Fifa 2000, both on the PlayStation. Four gold awards have gone to James Bond: Tomorrow Never Dies (MGM/Electronic Arts) and Tomb Raider 4: The Last Revelation (Eidos) plus Pokémon Red and Pokémon Blue on the Nintendo Game Boy.

PC=PS2?
Nvidia, the leading graphics chip manufacturer, says it has achieved performance very close to the Sony PlayStation 2 with the latest version of its GeForce chip, announced yesterday. The GeForce GPS should be available in boards from PC graphics card manufacturers such as Creative Labs in the first half of next month. Nvidia has also received $200 million from Microsoft to fund the development of an even faster graphics chip for its X-Box games console.

Most men do it
America's Interactive Digital Software Association says that 60% of Americans over the age of six - 145 million of them - now play video computer games, and the average player is 28 years old. Perhaps surprisingly, 43% of gamers are female, according to the telephone survey conducted by Peter D Hart Research Associates. Now the 95% who are spotty 15 year olds are trying to figure out where they're hiding...

Big game
The world's biggest game of Tetris has been played by a group of Brown University students. They used one side of the 14-storey science library for the screen, which was built using 10,000 Christmas lights in wooden frames, and 3,000 feet of cable. It's a game, it's an integrated art installation, and it's a candidate for the Guinness Book of World Records. See http://bastilleweb.techhouse.org