Interviews// Play Expo 2012: The New Kid on the Block

SPOnG: The way you talk about gaming events before Retro Reunited - that you wanted to bring it out of the pub back rooms - it sounds like those small events were really the only ones available to gamers in the North. Is that your experience?

Gordon Sinclair: In terms of expos... I can’t think of a single one, other than Eurogamer Expo 2009 when they were in Leeds. I can’t think of another gaming expo at all that’s been any further North than Birmingham. And even in Birmingham, I only know of GameFest from last year. These small events were the only things you could do. There may have been the odd small pro-gaming tournament - and EGL have been running theirs all over the country - but that’s it. It’s all small community-based stuff.

There’s a massive demand from people who just want to... they want the big-show experience. It’s a day out. We found with our Blackpool show, that this is an event that people look forward to for seven or eight months. People were buying their tickets and booking hotels months in advance, and that was their treat, their little break away.

One element we’ve recently added to our shows is the Replay Lounge. It’s a square table, with a sofa on each side, and multiplayer games on four systems. So sixteen people can play at once in this relatively small area, but we’ve got sofas there to sit on. You can play Micro Machines or Call of Duty or anything with your mates - if they kill you, you can nudge them with your elbow and... it’s not just hurling abuse down your headset on Xbox Live.


SPOnG: Now that’s a rather small idea that makes a world of difference - that human element of playing with your mates.

Gordon Sinclair: Yeah! It feels like the old days, when you used to do that - sat on your sofas or the edge of your bed, playing with your mates in the same room. It’s bringing back that more social aspect of gaming.

Social gaming has become a real dirty term now, because people associate it with Facebook and iPod games. Social gaming, to us, is people being in the same room together playing games, talking about games and having fun as a group of gamers.

It’s the social aspect of being able to talk to people about their experiences, what they like and don’t like. It’s brilliant, and that’s one of the main focuses we’ve had at our events now. The idea of the Lounge is one that is completely unique, in terms of these big events.


SPOnG: How so?

Gordon Sinclair: Well, with Eurogamer Expo... and don’t get me wrong, last year’s event was really good in terms of the way they made it look, but I went to the one in Leeds in 2009 and it was soulless. It was blank walls with just machines, and you queued up to get on the games.

That was it. It wasn’t a show. It was trying to sell me a game which is coming out in a couple of months. Which is brilliant, if that’s all you want. But there was no social aspect, and I came away from that knowing how not to do our event.

Eurogamer has done a great job of turning its events around, and I don’t know if its London one was better than its Leeds one that year. Maybe it was because it was only in Leeds and it was smaller than the London one. Maybe it suffered, but we came away learning a lot of lessons about how to stage our Blackpool show.

That was a great learning experience. And that’s why our ethos is that it’s all about coming to play games and socialising. I was saying to somebody earlier that what we used to do in our first shows was have a tray with 20-30 games in it - people could pick their own game and play it right there and then. You’ve got a Mega Drive. It doesn’t take any time to load a Mega Drive cartridge, so you just pick one up and put it in, play it and let someone else have a go.

That was always our plan. You’re not coming because somebody wants to sell you something. You come because this is an event for you to spend some time with games, to spend some time playing games that you probably don’t get the opportunity to... but it’s that social aspect, and that’s the key thing. Especially now we have an area for the latest games, we don’t want to lose that.

We don’t want to turn it into a bunch of half-hour queues for Call of Duty. Inevitably, we’re going to have some element of that, but we’ll make sure that we supplement that with some more fun parts that... I think you could liken it to something like DisneyLand. You know you’ve got to queue, but they make the queuing enjoyable.

And there’s so much other stuff you can do, that it doesn’t sully the experience. I think that’s what we want to do - we want to be the Disney of these kind of events, without the cheese.


SPOnG: So no ‘It’s a Small World’ rides?

Gordon Sinclair: That might be a good idea, actually! You could have different game characters as you go around. That would be quite funny. I’m actually warming to that idea [laughs].


SPOnG: Your emphasis on the gaming community and the social aspect of things is the same sort of experience that many could attach to the Penny Arcade Expo. There’s obviously a very big absence of something like PAX in the UK - do you think you guys can fill that gap?

Gordon Sinclair: I think that’s our aim. We want to do that, yeah. We would love to get out there and see some of these events in the US. There might be some good ones over there, but there’s also some terrible ones that we’ve seen reports of. We’ve got friends in different parts of America who tell us what the gaming scene is like.

I’m not going to claim we know Penny Arcade, nor that we understand how they do things. But we want to be recognised in the same way they are. Everybody knows of PAX. And hopefully, for the right reasons! That’s what we want for Play, to be honest, and that was a real key thing in changing the name from Replay too. We just want people to recognise us as the gameplay expo.

This isn’t the place for one thing - this is the place for every kind of game, and every kind of gamer. It’s more about playing games than it is about selling games. Of course, if you come away buying some games or a pre-order or two, that’s great. But it’s about bringing people into that atmosphere to play some games. And hopefully, that’s what we’re doing.

And hopefully we’ll get an opportunity to get out to the States and sample some of their events, see if we can learn anything - or see if we can bring anything to them. It would be brilliant to take some UK-only systems to the States as something unique. If we took a Spectrum over, I don’t know how Americans will take to that. It would be great to see.


SPOnG: What have been some of the biggest challenges that you’ve faced over the years of hosting these kinds of events?

Gordon Sinclair: Absolutely the biggest one, obviously, is cost. There’s three of us in this business, as well as a very large team of supporters. But there are three of us who are trying to make a living out of this. So to risk the amount of money you need to just to book a venue - forgetting all the other costs - is immense. The venue alone this year is costing us five times as much as last year’s Blackpool show.

That’s quite a scary concept when you’ve also got to make some money. Andy’s got a young family, I’ve got a home to pay for and so has Dave. It’s the cost that’s the biggest hurdle. It’s given me a few sleepless nights, after signing the contracts for the venue! But we get enough from our non-show business - all of our corporate events stuff, equipment hire and so on - to see us through. We’ll be okay.

The other biggest challenge - and the reason why we’re doing this - is getting the games publishers involved. Blackpool was never going to bring in big numbers, so hopefully the move to Manchester, doing events like this, should allow us to get them engaged in what we’re doing. But those two - money and publishers - are probably the biggest challenges anyone’s going to face if they’re going to try and do something of this scale.

The things we don’t struggle with are... we don’t struggle with how we can entertain people, because we have a tonne of ideas of how we can make this a fantastic show. We’ve also got such a good team of supporters who will come along and be crew for the weekend - and these are people who know games inside out.

We’ve built up such a great team now, that it’s been really useful for us going through a lot of the smaller shows, and bringing the people along with us. Hopefully they’re enjoying this wild ride of quick expansion as much as we are.


SPOnG: Thank you very much for your time.

Gordon Sinclair: Thanks!


Play Expo will take place on 13-14 October 2012 at Manchester’s Event City. Tickets can be purchased here.

http://www.playexpo.net/
http://www.ticketline.co.uk/play-expo-2012#bio