Back in March I was handed a letter from a colleague at work with the words “I think you’ll like this”. It was a letter and flyer from Gordon Sinclair about his event called Retro Reunited. Upon closer inspection as well as being right before my boyfriend’s birthday it was up in bloody Huddersfield! Us Londoners are certainly spoilt by gaming events.
This didn’t deter me, not only did the event celebrate the history of gaming and give attendees the chance to play a wide range of weird and wonderful games, but it was all in aid of the Charity Shelter. Not one to pass up an opportunity to be a geek for a good cause and do some good work for Ubisoft, I gave Gordon a call. I think I gave him a bit of a shock at first but we soon got chatting and over the next few months we arranged a space for me to take some of our TMNT themed games to play and I was also asked to do a talk on the history of Ubisoft.
After a rather stressful journey from Surrey to Huddersfield, I finally got to hotel and collapsed. After taking a moment to re-locate my shoulders after carrying a stupidly heavy bag, I called Gordon. I met him just before they planned to move in a ton of equipment into the main hall. I met Darren Doyle (Greyfox) and Simon (Boggyb) and gave them a hand with their stuff before setting up my own stand and heading to the bar for drink! We spent the evening chatting about games, drinking A LOT and people being shocked at how young I am. Seriously, everyone commented on how young I was it was strange!
As the doors opened to the public I suddenly realised WHY everyone was so shocked at my age. I was definitely in the younger, and smaller, percent of the attendees. Not that it was a bad thing, just a little odd. I met up with the lovely Andy Taylor and Jason Fitzpatrick from Computing History who had an impressive collection on display and the biggest Rubik’s Cube I had ever seen! I also met Vinny Patel, the organiser of RCM, another Retro Gmaing even held in Leicester in November. He was a nice chap and saved me from some of the odd people that were following me around the event.
My panel was the first of the event and as such I was struck with all the tech issues. I was really grateful that many of the people who came to listen waited. My presentation was pretty short as I didn’t want to bore people with too much details of Ubi’s History, especially the stock market info. I think they would have fallen asleep from a mixture of boredom and hangovers. I did manage to find the cheesiest photo of Yves Guillemot for the presentation which I thought started it off nicely.
There was a massive selection of consoles, PCs and games on display. It was incredible. All the items on show belonged to attendees, there was so much respect for the items on show, it was a nice change form other gaming events. It was great to feel like I could leave a wiimote on display and not have to nail it to the table! Here’s a quick overview of what was on show:
- Acorn World had a collection of well, Acorn Computers on display
- Computing History had a Sinclair C5, an Asteroids cocktail cabinet, a Commodore PET, MMC Beebs and more!
- Megadrives, 32X and so on
- Nintendo Consoles – N64s, NESs, SNESs, Wiis, Super Famicoms and more!
- A mint Virtual Boy(!)
- All the Sony and Miscrosoft consoles
- A Paperboy Arcade cab that was later auctioned off
- A Janey Thompson’s Marathon arcade machine which someone spent THREE HOURS playing on the Saturday to complete the 26.4 mile marathon. Nuts!
- And so much more…
The highlight of the event for me was meeting Mr Charles Cecil again. He’s a lovely man and the creator of my favourite games of all time! Yep, I’m a HUGE Broken Sword fangirl. Anyone who was lucky enough to join Charle’s panel (well, sit and chat), will have noticed that. His talk was definitely my highlight of the entire event. He allowed us to play the new Beneath a Steel Sky for iPhone and hinted at some future projects he is working on. There was a cheeky nod towards a new Broken Sword game which has left me well and truly teased. I cannot wait to find out some more information about that!! After the chat we headed to the bar for some drinks and dinner which Charles was kind enough to pay for. He’s a star for putting up with my fangirling I swear.
The rest of the event was spent playing various games, including Rockband which became VERY entertaining
as everyone became more merry. The merriment continued on into the bar once the event closed. I spent the evening chatting to Llyod, the creator of the game Mole Miner for the Google Android phone, the awesome Jon Ritman and Darren Doyle, the creative mastermind behind RR’s graphics. I love talking to passionate gamers about their loves and hates. There were quite a few heated and pretty in depth conversations, it was awesome!
The following day we spent incredibly hungover and dreading the journey home. All in all the event was great and everyone I met (bar the strange stalkers :S) were really friendly. I’m very much looking forward to attending the next event. You can see more of my photos in the gallery below.
