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STOKE ON TRENT: The shelves lining Luke Malpass’s 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’s 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.
“I think it can be partly nostalgic,” said Malpass, 38, as he surveyed the electronics stacked at his home in the central English city of Stoke-on-Trent.
He said the huge 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.”
Electronic devices and accessories, some dating back to the 1980s and the dawn of the gaming revolution, await to be lovingly restored to life.
Malpass has between 50 to 150 consoles needing attention at any one time, at a cost of between £60 ($78) and several hundred pounds.
It’s not just nostalgia for a long-lost childhood.
He believes it’s also a way to disconnect, unlike most online games which are now multi-player and require skills honed over long hours of practice to reach a good level.
“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 told AFP.
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, who is a fan of such games as “Resident Evil” and “Jurassic Park,” even goes so far as to buy old televisions with cathode-ray tubes to replicate more faithfully his experience of playing video games as a kid.
Video clips he films of his game play, which he publishes to his YouTube channel, have won him tens of thousands of followers.


“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.”
This week a survey organized by BAFTA, the British association that honors films, television, and video games, voted the 1999 action game “Shenmue” as the most influential video game of all time.
“Doom,” launched in 1993, and “Super Mario Bros.,” in which Mario first started trying to rescue Princess Peach way back in 1985, came in second and third place.
And on Wednesday, Nintendo unveiled details of its long-awaited Switch 2 console.
It includes new versions of beloved favorites from the Japanese giant — “Mario Kart World” and “Donkey Kong Bonanza.”
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 a Sonic image.
Collectors and gamers sifted carefully through stacks of CD discs and old consoles hoping to find hidden treasures.
For Andy Brown, managing director of Replay Events and organizer of the London event which is now in its 10th year, 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 told AFP.
A study earlier this year by the US association Consumer Reports found 14 percent of Americans play on consoles made before 2000.
And in September, 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.

PARIS: A new exhibition opening in Paris on Friday showcases archaeological artifacts from Gaza, once a major commercial crossroads between Asia and Africa, whose heritage has been ravaged by Israel’s ongoing onslaught.
Around a hundred artifacts, including a 4,000-year-old bowl, a sixth-century mosaic from a Byzantine church and a Greek-inspired statue of Aphrodite, are on display at the Institut du Monde Arabe.
The rich and mixed collection speaks to Gaza’s past as a cultural melting pot, but the show’s creators also wanted to highlight the contemporary destruction caused by the war, sparked by Hamas’s attack on Israel in October 2023.
“The priority is obviously human lives, not heritage,” said Elodie Bouffard, curator of the exhibition, which is titled “Saved Treasures of Gaza: 5,000 Years of History.”
“But we also wanted to show that, for millennia, Gaza was the endpoint of caravan routes, a port that minted its own currency, and a city that thrived at the meeting point of water and sand,” she told AFP.
One section of the exhibition documents the extent of recent destruction.
Using satellite image, the UN’s cultural agency UNESCO has already identified damage to 94 heritage sites in Gaza, including the 13th-century Pasha’s Palace.
Bouffard said the damage to the known sites as well as treasures potentially hidden in unexplored Palestinian land “depends on the bomb tonnage and their impact on the surface and underground.”
“For now, it’s impossible to assess.”
The attacks by Hamas militants on Israel in 2023 left 1,218 dead. In retaliation, Israeli operations have killed more than 50,000 Palestinians and devastated the densely populated territory.

The story behind “Gaza’s Treasures” is inseparable from the ongoing wars in the Middle East.
At the end of 2024, the Institut du Monde Arabe was finalizing an exhibition on artifacts from the archaeological site of Byblos in Lebanon, but Israeli bombings on Beirut made the project impossible.
“It came to a sudden halt, but we couldn’t allow ourselves to be discouraged,” said Bouffard.
The idea of an exhibition on Gaza’s heritage emerged.
“We had just four and a half months to put it together. That had never been done before,” she explained.
Given the impossibility of transporting artifacts out of Gaza, the Institut turned to 529 pieces stored in crates in a specialized Geneva art warehouse since 2006. The works belong to the Palestinian Authority, which administers the West Bank.

The Oslo Accords of 1993, signed by the Palestine Liberation Organization and Israel, helped secure some of Gaza’s treasures.
In 1995, Gaza’s Department of Antiquities was established, which oversaw the first archaeological digs in collaboration with the French Biblical and Archaeological School of Jerusalem (EBAF).
Over the years, excavations uncovered the remains of the Monastery of Saint Hilarion, the ancient Greek port of Anthedon, and a Roman necropolis — traces of civilizations spanning from the Bronze Age to Ottoman influences in the late 19th century.
“Between Egypt, Mesopotamian powers, and the Hasmoneans, Gaza has been a constant target of conquest and destruction throughout history,” Bouffard noted.
In the 4th century BC, Greek leader Alexander the Great besieged the city for two months, leaving behind massacres and devastation.
Excavations in Gaza came to a standstill when Hamas took power in 2007 and Israel imposed a blockade.
Land pressure and rampant building in one of the world’s most densely populated areas has also complicated archaeological work.
And after a year and a half of war, resuming excavations seems like an ever-more distant prospect.
The exhibition runs until November 2, 2025.