‘There’s no stress’: gamers go offline in retro console revival

Trend to fix or buy consoles such as Game Gear or Nintendo 64s may reflect a desire for internet-free fun. 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. 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.