At one point, watching Cruise skitter through Paris on a motorcycle, I realized I didn’t know who was chasing him or where he was going. I didn’t care; I could see Cruise’s face, and it told me he was on the run from something, while trying to get somewhere else, quickly. The threat of the bomb always looms, and Hunt never wavers in either his love for his friends or his will to do his job well. He is thus spared from making any ethical compromises—he really can have it all.

What has changed, two decades on, is the thrust of these games. There has been, in video-game sports as in the culture at large, an astonishing administrative bloat. The first time I noticed the shift was in playing GameDay 2000, a basic NFL simulator. Sure, you could play an NFL game, watch the tightly-packed polygonal men glitch through one another, watch the victory dances to buttrock anthems. But GameDay also let you start a franchise. Now, instead of calling plays and moving small men around, you were the GM. The game let you simulate entire seasons, no longer bothering with the incidental back-and-forth of moving a ball across a field, but playing football on a world-historic level. In the offseason you would trade and draft new players, based on stats generated by the computer, new rookies with computer-generated names populating your team, until your Chicago Bears were unrecognizable, the year was 2020, and your franchise had won the past decade of Super Bowl rings.