Heck, take out the sound and it would fit on a couple of floppy discs. With Uplink you have a game that would rattle around on a free USB stick from five years ago. They're a team who have to fake progress bars for our own comfort. Darwinia, famously, had to be given an enormous opening movie file so people installing it didn't think it hadn't worked. Introversion have always been developers of extraordinary economy. This is a lot of effort for ordering pizza. In fact, the full download of the game via Steam is 14MB. Simple, elegant text, a basic world-map interface for establishing your connections, and little else to trouble your machine. The presentation, while peculiarly spaced out and in teeny text at current resolutions (didn't predict those eh, Introversion?!), was already harking back to a classic design a decade ago.

(I'm sure people in the comments will point out how much I've arsed this up.) I'm also not entirely clear what a Gq is, and therefore can't figure out if 32Gq of RAM is good. I'd like me one of those 200Gig Octo-cores very much. What's slightly less accurate is Introversion's optimism that by now they'd be running at 200GHz. This is a time when gateway computers would be able to handle as many as eight CPUs. With money comes the ability to purchase better equipment, and with better equipment comes the ability to complete more complex hacks. You play a bedroom cracker, burrowing your way into multiple computers for cash payment. Uplink was - and very much still is thanks to its simplicity and ageless design - a hacking game. Instead, well, they either wildly over-estimated or got it pretty spot on. The nine-year-old game was set in 2010, and ideally you want something created in 2001 to have made sweet predictions of machines coming with over a gigabyte of RAM, or similar. Uplink disappointingly fails to get it embarrassingly wrong. What manner of life will we be living? And most importantly, what sort of computers will we be working with? Let your mind stretch out and attempt to perceive the thrill, the technological adventure. Come with me now, as we attempt to picture the year 2010.

Uplink game download