A note arriving on our desk this week reports that the Spanish Association of Video Games has released data which shows that the products it covers had generated €1.08bn in 2015.

A double-take on that… Video games “generated” just over a billion euros? In Spain alone? It turned out, after some investigation, that credulity can return. It was referring to the business generated by online games, sold to players on home consoles - Xboxes, Playstations and Wiis - and to mobile games for phones or tablets. That included the actual sales of the necessary hardware to the tune of €791m. In all, 820,000 consoles were sold in Spain during the year.

The point really is that if those stats represent the video games business in just Spain, outside of our familiar coin-op versions of course, then what will the figures be pan-Europe? And given that the entire business began with our coin-op versions, then we should lament what we have lost.

The video games business is verily a pale shadow of what it once was. There’s only a few of us who will remember the Atari Pong game, that most basic of inventions which everyone simply mounted inside black and white TV sets and made a fast killing.

But that set into train a glorious phase of invention, ingenuity and creativeness which was to lay the foundation of the amusement business – the pure amusement business, I mean, not that adulterated watered-down (but commercially essential) gambling machine which was the AWP.

The 1970s and 1980s was to unleash on to our arcade screens and, yes, those in many pubs too, a whole mass of entertainment which has subsequently lost little of its creativity even if the volumes have slumped. These days it is a case of seeing which mobile games will transfer across to the coin-op sector, rather than the other way around.

But the slump in numbers has also seen the transfer of that creativity into making the coin-op product more exclusive. You cannot ride a motor cycle with all of the movement and sound effects on a Wii that you can on a dedicated game in an arcade.

That is obviously not going to be enough to resurrect the numbers, but the video game has managed to survive and to become the central focus of any arcade or family entertainment centre anywhere in the world. There is always - always - a bank of them right at the front. Call it the “attract mode” for the locations, if you will, but the function is irrepressible.

What the future holds for the video game remains to be seen. It is today used for redemption, it is used in kiddie rides, it is used in the highest of profile and hardest of gambling casino slots. The video remains, but I still yearn for those pioneering days.

You never really appreciate just what you’ve got until you don’t have it any more.