Nestled between an original Donkey Kong arcade machine, a mint condition OutRun racing simulation game and booths wired up with GameCubes and Nintendo 64s, the engineer Luke Malpass works away dismantling a broken Nintendo Wii.
There has been a steady stream of people bringing in their old game consoles for repairs or modifications, on the house, to Four Quarters, a retro games arcade in Elephant and Castle, which has been transformed into a games clinic for two days.
Gabriella Rosenau, 35, brought in her broken Wii that had been in the garage “for years”. “I still play my brother’s old Nintendo 64 and I love it, but I’d really love to get [the Wii] fixed.”
“I’ve done the odd bit of Call of Duty and the PlayStation stuff, but I have more of an interest in the retro games,” she adds.
Rosenau is part of a growing community who are ditching contemporary video games and picking up the consoles from their childhood, or even before their time. And gen Z gamers are following suit, with 24% owning a retro console, according to research by Pringles.
What started as a passion project for Malpass, restoring consoles to their former glory, quickly evolved into a full-time business. At its peak during lockdown, his company RetroSix employed 16 people to cope with demand. He puts this down – in part – to people being stuck at home. “People were bored, finding things at home and searching for things online.
“We originally were just selling on eBay, we didn’t even have a site, and eBay were limiting our sales because they thought it was fraudulent,” he says. “It literally took over.”
RetroSix still gets hundreds of requests each month from people hoping to get their consoles fully working and playable, or upgraded. This has “stabilised”, Malpass says, though the community is still expanding.
“There’s a whole variety of people who are into this now. The older-than-me generation, so sort of late 40s, early 50s, who tend to be PC-based with Amigas and Commodores. Then my age, so people in their 30s, who are very much into the Game Boys, the Mega Drives, Super Nintendo Entertainment Systems, things like that.
“And then there’s a younger generation that are either into [the] Nintendo DS, things they played with that are starting to become retro, or they’re just really obsessed with retro as a whole. So you do get people in their 20s that are more obsessed than we are, even though they didn’t grow up with it,” he says.
Malpass has amassed a large following on social media and has 61,700 subscribers on his YouTube channel, AngelSix, and 44,100 followers on RetroSix’s TikTok, where he shares videos about repairs and his inventions with the community.
The young people who engage online say they are reaching for retro games because of the distinctive gameplay, and for the chance to “switch off”, Malpass says.
“You turn your console on at the top, you’re gaming. There’s no stress, there’s no internet, you’re not competing against the world. You’ve got yourself in a game, you feel a sense of achievement as you’re going and that was originally what you used to do,” he says.
“I think younger generations have got a lot more stress now, growing up in the social media world is mentally very challenging. [Retro video gaming] is their safe place. It’s like their escape,” he says.
Matthew Dolan, a software developer in his 40s, brought along parts of his Game Gear console. His passion for retro gaming and technology stems from nostalgia and childhood memories playing games his father had written for him on the BBC Micro. “It was a great introduction to technology,” he says.
“You get all that joy from just literally playing it. Going through batteries, planning your long car journeys out based on how long they’ll last,” he says. “They’re not relying on flashy graphics in the same way [as contemporary games].”
Going one step further, Dolan now fixes and adapts consoles himself, and says he spent £7,000 on the hobby last year. “I got some of that back, from selling things on, but it’s not cheap.”
He got stuck trying to repair some of the chips on his Game Gear and needed Malpass’s expertise. A repaired Prestige Edition Game Gear console from RetroSix costs £298.80. The LED edition costs £334.80 and mods or servicing on the console start at £36.
Popular retro consoles
Game Boy
A handheld game console developed and manufactured by Nintendo. It first came out in Japan in 1989 and was released in Europe in 1990. It is estimated more than 118.7m Game Boys and Game Boy Colors have been sold worldwide, making it one of the most successful handheld consoles of its era, popular owing to its compact design and affordability.
SNES
The Super Nintendo Entertainment System, also known as the Super NES, was the second home video game console released by Nintendo internationally. It was first released in 1990 by Nintendo in Japan and reached Europe in 1992. It is estimated that the SNES sold 49.1m units worldwide by the time it was discontinued in 2003.
Xbox original
The Xbox console was Microsoft’s first games console offering and the first instalment in the Xbox series of consoles, first released in Europe in 2002. At the time, it sold for £299 and was competing with Sony’s PlayStation 2 and Nintendo’s GameCube. The second-generation Xbox 360 was released in 2005.
Amiga
A line of personal computers produced by Commodore International from 1985 until 1994, until its bankruptcy. Other companies continued producing the Amiga after this. The Amiga 1000, also known as the A1000, was the first personal computer released by Commodore International in the Amiga line. It was known for its advanced graphics and sound. Popular games include Alien Breed, Syndicate, Sensible Soccer and Eye of the Beholder.
Game Gear
A handheld gaming console, released by Sega in Japan in 1990 and in Europe the following year. Game Gear primarily competed with Nintendo’s Game Boy, the Atari Lynx, and NEC’s TurboExpress. During 1991, about 520,000 Game Gears were sold across Europe, with more than 130,000 of those being sold in the UK.
