Ross Combs and Rob Crittenden, two of the lead developers on bnetd, say all they ever wanted to do was create a place to play best-selling Blizzard games like Starcraft and Diablo in a friendly online atmosphere free of the technical bugs that plague Battle.net.

Anyone who has ventured on to Battle.net to wage war against aliens or to hack and slash through dungeons is likely to appreciate the sentiment. Battle.net's popularity has been one of its great drawbacks. Frequent crashes and slow response times due to a huge crush of players -- especially right after the release of a new game -- can often make Battle.net an unpleasant experience. The technical problems are exacerbated by social malfunctions: the malicious killing of some gamers by other players and the proliferation of hacks that give some players unfair advantages.

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Wait just a second. Elevator Action for the Atari 2600? In the 21st century? Isn't the Atari 2600 the archaic console that only plays those games with the rinky-dink graphics and sound and simplistic play, like Combat and that godawful version of Pac-Man? The one with the goofy pseudo wood-grain trim on its casing that started the whole video game console market 24 years ago?

Yep. The Atari 2600 ceased production in 1989. But practically speaking it never really went away. The abandoned system has been adopted by online fans, who nurture it with loving care. And they're doing more than just keeping it on life support; the Atari 2600 is actually growing -- new games are being written, and new hardware is being manufactured. Affection for the system and its classic games may be strongest among those who were kids or teenagers during its heyday, but even though the 2600's technology is Neolithic compared with present-day systems, it's still gaining new fans. Some are programmers who want to test their skills against the severe restrictions forced by primitive hardware. Some are attracted to games that emphasize playability over whiz-bang graphics. And some just think the system's hip.

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If the above sound like fanciful ideas dreamed up by fans, that's because they are. And the odd thing is, they also actually exist for you to watch and enjoy.

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Inspired by the look of the Sims (which he has yet to play, he admits), Haddock created his faux game images using Photoshop. His first criteria for choosing a subject to interpret in this computer game-style perspective was that it be an image or event that had affected him profoundly. In doing so, Haddock gives equal merit to both the fictitious and actual.

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The 21-year-old systems administrator in Philadelphia isn't talking about an allergic reaction or the aftermath of a wild night of drinking. Nope, this is his thanks for creeping around abandoned missile silos and evading ruthless assassins in Half-Life's Black Mesa Federal Research Facility or emerging victorious from a death match in Unreal Tournament. These fast-action games make him sick. Literally.

Paul Tomblin, 39, faces similar problems. A programmer and small-plane pilot, Tomblin overcame the motion sickness that plagued him during flight training, but when he's careening through the virtual terrain of games like Half-Life and Quake III, he still gets nauseous. "Sometimes, after a long session of playing, I have to go lie down -- I definitely feel like I'm going to throw up," he says. "I also get bad headaches and a feeling like my eyeball muscles are tired."

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The shootout and the extravagant party that followed were held to celebrate the long-delayed release of Daikatana. There was just one problem: ION missed its pre-Christmas target date for the game, just as it had missed a calendar's worth of scheduled launches over the previous year and a half. Since the party, talk of a mid-January launch has come and gone, and no game has been released. At this point, gamers have stopped asking when Daikatana will hit store shelves. If they think of Daikatana at all, they're more likely to ask: When ION eventually gets this terminally late game out the door, will anyone still care?

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That future remains uncertain -- because "Millennium" won't return when the fall season starts this month. The TV series was canceled in May after three lackluster seasons.

But an unofficial fourth season of "Millennium" is well into its eighth episode on the Net. The virtual season on the Millennium Compendium fan site is currently "airing" the "Twilight Years" episode, in which Frank Black searches for a gruesome killer, and promises to premiere "Acolyte" on Friday. This virtual season represents the handiwork of 11 fans who are determined to keep the network failure alive, at least until the new year.

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The game industry has grown up around successive generations of hardware, like the original Nintendo game box or the Sony PlayStation. Consumers benefited since competing formats spurred the advancement of video game technology. And the companies that owned a gaming platform made money through licensing fees, which third-party game developers pay for the right to make games for the company's console.

But now this comfy arrangement is getting thrown out of whack by a new wave of emulators -- software that in effect allows one kind of machine to impersonate another. An emulator program running on a PC or Mac mimics the hardware of a video game console, video arcade machine or another computer platform, enabling the computer running the emulator to use most software designed for the emulated hardware. Most emulators are created for fun and distributed for free by their creators. But as they grow powerful, they're beginning to force a fundamental transformation in how the game business works, liberating code from its hardware shackles -- and threatening the end of the game console as we know it.

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In the postponed episode, "Graduation Day, Part II," originally set to air on May 25, Buffy and her entire graduating class of Sunnydale High battle Sunnydale's evil mayor, who turns into a giant snake-demon while speaking at their commencement. The graduates respond by throwing off their gowns to reveal an arsenal of flamethrowers and bows and arrows. At the end, a large section of the high school building is blown up -- and student characters are shown unloading bags of fertilizer to make a big bomb that will kill the mayor-demon.

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The first two Wing Commander games used simple cartoon animation for the "cut scenes." But starting with the second sequel, Roberts directed real actors like Mark Hamill and Malcolm McDowell. It seems appropriate, therefore, that Wing Commander -- the computer game best known for its movielike quality -- is now coming to a movie theater near you. Shot for $27 million (a modest budget for a science-fiction feature), the "Wing Commander" movie, which opens this weekend, stars Freddie Prinze Jr. ("I Know What You Did Last Summer") and Matthew Lillard ("Scream").

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But now anybody who wants to build an original 3-D graphics game can pick up one such software engine for free -- thanks to a game developer called Crack dot Com that went out of business last year.

Started in June 1994 in Mesquite, Texas -- the Dallas suburb that's home to id Software, makers of the frighteningly successful Doom and Quake franchises -- Crack dot Com once had a promising future. Its most popular game, a side-view action shooter called Abuse, netted enough in royalties for the company to fund work on a follow-up title.

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Maybe not. The game industry, thanks to its own success and the wave of corporate consolidation that has recently swept over it, is becoming more like the rock 'n' roll business. Making video games is a group effort, requiring the talents of programmers, graphic artists and designers. And much like garage bands just starting out, game-developer startups aiming for the big time are increasingly needing to seek talent representation -- that is, agents.

"The industry is composed of large, well-funded, well-managed publishers and small, under-capitalized and often poorly managed developers," says game software agent Bob Jacob. "These parties can hardly talk to one another, let alone understand one another."

"From the publisher's point of view, we may be seen as an acceptable component of the process or even as an unnecessary evil," says Jacob's fellow agent and business partner, Clyde Grossman. "But our role is to present a coherent package of game concept, resources, time and budget to the appropriate publisher. Some (enlightened) publishers understand that our involvement benefits them, and that we work with our clients to lessen the likelihood of unexpected schedule delays or budget over-runs."

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The 1997-98 season for the major and minor broadcast TV networks saw notable campaigns on the Net for six canceled series. (For some reason, one-hour dramas tend to inspire the most support online.) Of those six, two were brought back by their respective networks, apparently thanks to the fervent protests of fans on the Net.

Pat Kleckner, who works as a marketing and technical support representative for a computer company, sums up her and her online colleagues' efforts: "We wanted 'The Magnificent Seven' back on CBS. And we had the tools to make that happen. Our secret weapon: the Internet."

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Straddling the legal line between reverse-engineering and software piracy, scores of programmers are coding freeware programs that emulate the hardware of video-game consoles, arcade machines and even other personal-computer formats.

Most media coverage has depicted emulation (or "emu") programming as a backward-looking novelty: "Hey, remember all those cool arcade games you played in the early '80s? Now you can run the same exact code on your PC and play them again!" But what's happening is deeper than just digital nostalgia: Emu programming is seriously blurring the lines between the proprietary formats that have always balkanized electronic gaming.

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Officially, not much is known about the movie. We do know that it, like the rest of the trilogy, will be a "prequel" set before the events of the original "Star Wars" trilogy. It will introduce us to a 9-year-old Anakin Skywalker -- the future father of Luke and Leia who's destined to become Darth Vader. Other than who's starring in it -- Liam Neeson, Ewan McGregor and Natalie Portman -- that's about it.

Unofficially, on the Web, much, much more is known about this film -- depending on whether you're willing to believe what you read. While scoops sent in by spies involved in a film's production have become standard material on movie-gossip Web sites, for the "Star Wars" prequel the process has been both more intense and better organized.

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