Last weekend was just like Christmas Eve for Will Statton. He could hardly sleep he was so excited. He spent much of Sunday evening picking up his old toys, playing with them for a bit, and then discarding them. There was no excitement in them.

He just couldn’t wait until midnight on Monday when Santa — in the form of his local HMV store — opened early and he could lay his hands on Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, the most eagerly anticipated new video game for years.

Will was in the queue almost an hour early and feeling, he said later, “like Charlie waiting outside the chocolate factory”. As soon as the shrink-wrapped package was in his hand he ran home and sat up long into the night machine-gunning his alarmingly life-like enemies.

The following day, tired but happy, he feigned sickness to get out of his commitments despite the chaos that would inevitably follow.

After all, if the judge doesn’t show up, it’s rather tricky to get a trial to run smoothly.

Will (not his real name, for obvious reasons) is 48 years old and a district judge at a county court in England. He worked as a barrister for almost 15 years before he was appointed, has a wife and two kids and a hefty mortgage.

He is also a hardcore computer gamer, spending hundreds of pounds a year on new titles. It is people like Will who are propelling the gaming business to the top of the world entertainment league.

Modern Warfare 2 — which gives players the chance to play members of an elite military unit taking on a Russian nationalist terrorist group — sold 1.2m units and grossed about £47m on its first day in the UK alone, according to industry body Elspa. This was double the sales of the previous record holder, Grand Theft Auto IV.

Its combined first day earnings in the US and Britain of about £186m easily outstrip the £113m earned by The Dark Knight, which broke the film industry’s record for box office takings in its first weekend last year.

Indeed, Modern Warfare’s premiere in central London felt like a movie opening. The rapper Dizzee Rascal performed at the after-party, actors Kevin McKidd and Billy Murray showed up at the Leicester Square opening in a tux and

Vernon Kay and Dom Joly hosted the screening of scenes from the game. This was yet more evidence that video games have become as integral a part of modern culture as films, music and television.

In 2008, Britons spent about £4 billion on computer games and consoles, more than music sales and cinema box office combined. There are nearly 21.4m consoles and hand-held game devices in British homes and in the past 10 years, more than 335m games have been sold in Britain.