If you're a regular viewer of trendy BBC arts programme, The Culture Show, you'll already be aware of this, but in the unlikely event that you're not... the series is engaging in a search for the public's favourite British design icon. The suitably named Great British Design Quest, launched in conjunction with the Design Museum, features a longlist of 25 entries taking in the last 105 years of UK invention.
And in there with Concorde, Dr Marten boots, the telephone kiosk and the Raleigh Chopper are two videogames - can you guess what they are? I sort of gave it away in the title... Yes, it's GTA and Tomb Raider.
Two entries for the games industry is really not bad at all. The lamp industry, for example, only has one - with the angle-poise lamp. Sadly, there's no room for the ZX Spectrum, although Clive Sinclair does receive a nomination for the C5... ha ha, only joking, it's for the Executive Electronic Calculator from 1972.
Can you think of any more deserving videogame nominations? Perhaps Elite which created its own genre - and its own galaxy - on less memory than it takes to write a saucy email nowadays. Talking about sauciness, it's ironic that GTA's nomination for great design should come up in the very week that Take Two is threatened with legal action over Hot Coffee - an interactive sex scene accidentally left in the code of GTA San Andreas. That hardly reeks of rigorous design sensibilities, does it? I bet none of the other entrants have been found to contain lewd content. Oh, apart from telephone kiosks.
Anyway, you can find out more - and then vote - here.
