he opening of the new video games lounge in the revamped foyer of the National Media Museum tomorrow signals the growing importance of games to the Yorkshire economy generally and Bradford in particular.

Arcade games such as Pac Man, Frogger and Super Mario Kart, though still popular, have been succeeded by smaller, more ingenious gadgets.

Dedicated iPhone gamesters know all about Broken Sword: The Director’s Cut, from York-based Revolution Software, Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars, developed by Rockstar Leeds; and QuizQuizQuiz, the world’s number one trivia application – or ‘app’ – from Four Door Lemon Ltd, based in Bradford’s Little Germany.

At the film development agency Screen Yorkshire, Jamie Sefton is the Game Republic sector manager whose job is to draw together Yorkshire and Humberside students learning about this rapidly-evolving technology.

He says: “The last figures we have for 2008 show that the games industry in the UK was worth £4 billion. In this region it’s estimated it could be worth in the region of between £50m and £100m.

“People now understand this is big business. Increasingly, the digital download market is becoming more important. A guy in a back bedroom can write a game in a month and it can be competing with games by big companies. That’s because feedback is instant.

“It allows companies such as Four Door Lemon in Bradford to publish games themselves. They don’t have to pay someone to make CDs and sell them off the shelf. You can buy a game – an app – in 30 seconds. It’s a huge opportunity for all our companies, wherever they happen to be, to sell all over the world.”

Universities in Bradford, Huddersfield, Leeds and Hull run courses in computer animation, games design and artificial intelligence, building on hi-tech ingenuity and inventiveness that has been a feature of the Aire Valley over the past 20 years or more.

And yet the success of Four Door Lemon, the games company based in Burnett Street, Little Germany, is due principally to its founder and director, 27-year-old Simon Barratt, a self-taught computer programmer who left school in Hull at 16 to work for the Bradford company Pineapple Interactive.

He set up Four Door Lemon – the name derives from a long-forgotten joke – in 2005. Since then, he and his flexible team of programmers and designers have worked on up to 40 games projects for Sony and Nintendo. The contracts have been worth between £10,000 and £200,000.

But by far and away the most successful of these projects is QuizQuizQuiz, sold on Apple outlets, iTunes and App Store for between 59p and £1.59.

Simon says: “We have had 75,000 users since October last year. The game has been in the top ten in the UK and in every European country. We have a sequel coming out in April which we’re hoping will break into the American market.

“Games for the iPhone have only really come in in the past six months. Before that, it was PlayStation, Nintendo DS and Wii. We are getting approached for a lot of work for Facebook games.

“Paying out to artists and programmers can be expensive, so we hire in the skills we need for whatever projects we have. We have a core team of five, but that can go up to 20. Companies like Rockstar Leeds employ 80 to 90 people.”

He says his company would spend up to £500,000 developing a game; but the US company Infinity Wars spent nearly 100 times that amount on its blockbuster game Modern Warfare 2.

As the country gets embroiled ever deeper in controversies over debt, global warming, the state of Parliament, terrorism, war and the state of the European Union, young people are turning off and tuning out, amusing themselves in their own way.

Screen Yorkshire’s Jamie Sefton says: “There’s a whole generation growing up who will never use physical media, such as watching television, going to the cinema or borrowing a library book. Buying a CD in a shop is completely alien to them.

“They will watch television programmes from BBC iplayer on their computers while surfing the net and doing social networking on Facebook or Twitter.

“They’ve been downloading music and films, now they can download games and soon they’ll be downloading books. I’ve got a national newspaper app that allows me to read it on my phone. It’s updated throughout the day.

“The app store is a massive market place. In the last 18 months it’s had about three billions downloads. I don’t think people realise how good our companies are with this technology.”