The latest gaming news, really comes as no surprise to me. It seems that the gaming industry itself is looking to break records thanks to the 20-something crowd out there. As many of you undoubtly know, the 20-something crowd makes up a large majority of the video games sales here in the US.

The video game industry is poised to enjoy a record-breaking holiday season. For that, it can thank Charlie Paulson, a 22-year-old garden store employee, and other 20-somethings.

Mr. Paulson started playing video games when he was 5 years old. Now, having traded an allowance for disposable income, he routinely buys at least one video game a week, and one week this month he bought three games for around $150.

He couldn’t help himself because there is just “lots of new stuff out there,” said Mr. Paulson, who has three game consoles: a Sony PlayStation 2, a Microsoft Xbox and a Nintendo GameCube.

Aided by sales of games tailored for older teens and adults, the game industry is doing better than expected at what industry analysts say is the beginning of a normal cyclical downturn. Two games in particular - “Halo 2″ and “Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas” - have each sold more than 3.3 million copies in the last two months.

Overall sales of video games have been 11 percent higher so far this year than last year, according to NPD Group, a market research firm. Last year, the industry made 47 percent of its $7 billion in sales during the holiday quarter; this year, the holiday sales are expected to represent 50 percent of total sales, said William Lennan, an analyst with WR Hambrecht, a financial services firm. “It’s going to be the biggest Christmas ever for video games,” Mr. Lennan said. But he said the big question was whether sales would drop sharply next year as consumers put off buying games in anticipation of a new generation of game consoles expected in late 2005 and 2006.