Nostalgia fuels UK boom in vintage video games

• AFP, STOKE-ON-TRENT, England

The shelves lining Luke Malpass’ home workshop are a gamer’s treasure trove stretching back decades, with components of vintage Game Boys, Sega Mega Drives and Nintendos jostling for space and awaiting repair.

Parcels from gamers seeking help arrive from around the world at RetroSix, Malpass’ Aladdin’s cave.

He has turned a lifelong passion for gaming into a full-time job, answering the common question of what to do with old and worn machines and their parts.

Photo: AFP

“I think it can be partly nostalgic,” said Malpass, 38, as he surveyed the electronics stacked at his home Stoke-on-Trent, England.

He said the revival in retro games and consoles is not just a passing phase.

“Personally, I think it is the tactile experience. Getting a box off the shelf, physically inserting a game into the console … it makes you play it more and enjoy it more,” he said.

Electronic devices and accessories, some dating back to the 1980s and the dawn of the gaming revolution, await to be lovingly restored to life at his workshop.

Malpass has between 50 to 150 consoles needing attention at any one time, at a cost of ￡60 (US$77.31) to several hundred pounds.

It is not just nostalgia for a long-lost childhood, but also a way to disconnect, unlike modern online multiplayer games, he said.

“Retro gaming — just pick it up, turn it on, have an hour, have 10 minutes. It doesn’t matter. It’s instant, it’s there and it’s pleasurable,” he said.

With vintage one-player games “there’s no one you’re competing against and there’s nothing that’s making you miserable or angry.”

Malpass buys old televisions with cathode-ray tubes to replicate more faithfully his experience of playing video games as a kid.

“I think people are always going to have a natural passion for things that they grew up with as a child. So I think we’ll always have work. It’ll evolve, and it won’t be, probably, Game Boys,” Malpass said. “There’s always going to be something that’s retro.”

Held every four months, the London Gaming Market, dedicated to vintage video games, has been attracting growing numbers of fans.

“I’m a huge Sonic the Hedgehog fan… You never know what you’re going to find when you’re out here, so I’m just always on the lookout,” said Adrian, a visitor wearing a T-shirt with an image of Sonic.

Collectors and gamers carefully sifted through stacks of CDs and old consoles hoping to find hidden treasures.

Andy Brown — managing director of Replay Events and organizer of the event, now in its 10th year — said the COVID-19 pandemic marked an upturn in the return to vintage games.

“I think people were stuck at home, wanting things to do that made them remember better times because it was a lot of doom and gloom around COVID,” he said.

A study earlier this year by the US association Consumer Reports found that 14 percent of Americans play on consoles made before 2000.

In September last year, Italian customs busted a gang smuggling counterfeit vintage video games, seizing 12,000 machines containing some of the most popular games of the 1980s and 1990s.