The market for retro gaming has really picked up in the last decade and, before we were all locked down for two years, Replay Events was hosting several 'Gaming Markets' up and down the United Kingdom. The London Gaming Market of 20th March 2022 will likely be the first of many because, despite a big venue, and overspill stalls in some of the hall's adjoining rooms and corridors, this was not only the most crowded market I've ever attended, it was also the first that felt like one giant car boot sale. There were some genuine bargains for sale, presumably from collectors who can't be bothered with eBay any more and believe the prices of software have now maxxed out. There were also homebrew game and book publishers, console modders and what seemed like an acre of cardboard boxes and tables piled high with... import Japanese games.

I live in London, only a ten minute tube ride from The Royal National Hotel, which is where this event was held. It started showing up in my Facebook feeds about six weeks in advance. Early Bird tickets, allowing entry to the venue from 10:00am, would be £5... that is, if you responded to the ad in microseconds! By the time I tried to buy one, they'd all gone. Regular tickets, available on the door from 12:00pm, were £2 per person and I arrived there at 1:30pm and walked straight in. No-one asked me for £2 and, considering there looked to be about two thousand people (I kid you not) in the exhibition hall at that time, that's some serious admittance moolah that Replay Events seemed to have decided wasn't worth collecting.

Perhaps they, rather like me, were not expecting the turnout that this event prompted. Perhaps two years of being confined to apartments and flats in London has led to a tenfold increase in people who have got into this world. One thing was for sure, there was a lot of stuff changing hands. Every stall in the main hall had a throng of people filling their bags with loot, thrusting wads of cash back and forth, and haggling.

So what, exactly, was on sale? Well, games, obviously. Lots of games. Games for everything from the Vic-20 and TI-99/4A to the PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch. You weren't going to get more 'retro' than those stalls that had a dozen cardboard boxes full of Spectrum and Amstrad games, and you weren't going to get more modern than those exhibitors in attendance who seemed to have simply raided their local CEX and brought along every PlayStation 2, 3 and 4 game in the back catalogue. It wasn't, however, particularly easy to get near to any of these games. At least for the first hour I was there, from 1:30pm to 2:30pm, I couldn't even see most of the games on offer. Instead I spent most of my time staring at the backs of people's heads, waiting for even a small gap to squeeze into so I might at least see what I was missing.

It wasn't until about 3:00pm that the feeding frenzy abated a little. That's when I finally managed to snap a few photographs of the stalls and (perhaps) about a tenth of the merchandise that remained. I overheard one seller remarking to his colleague that "So much's gone, never would've believed it," an expression somewhat tinged with joy and sadness at the same time. At another stall I saw four buyers in quick succession spend over a thousand pounds within approximately five minutes. Yes, one thousand pounds. Buyer 1 took Resident Evil: Gaiden on the Gameboy Color for £400. Buyer 2 took Gregory Horror Show on the PS2 for £40 (a bargain!). Buyer 3 took Lost In The Rain on the PS3 for £250. And finally, Buyer 4 picked up an entire box of fifteen Nintendo Switch so-called 'Super Rare' games for £400.

Which, of course, leads me to a very interesting observation. The true retro games - the ones from the Eighties - of which there were thankfully plenty on sale, were priced considerably more generously than those from later decades. I scavenged through a few cardboard boxes and found Dragon 32 games for £3 each, and I even bought a copy of MRM's Castle Of Gems for the BBC B for £3. I bought it even though I already had my own personal copy of it at home... because it is genuinely rare, it was only on release for a few weeks before Atari realised it was a straight copy of Crystal Castles and had MRM withdraw all copies from sale. Now, I personally know this, like I personally know that Resident Evil: Gaiden is desirable to Resident Evil fans, Gregory Horror Show is desirable because it's so bafflingly weird and Lost In The Rain is coveted because it only ever came out with an English localisation in, of all places, China. What I observed at the London Gaming Market is that a lot of knowledge of rarity and desirability seems to be going 'mainstream'. Yes, there were some buyers seemingly picking up some of the more modern titles on spec, but I'd say that at least 30% of the buyers were zeroing in on any game priced even just a few pounds less than an eBay closing price and snapping it up. Indeed, I saw many buyers with a smartphone in one hand, crosschecking eBay prices.

There's a strange dichotomy about events on the scale of the London Gaming Market. Put simply, the contrast between what's hot and what's not is laid bare. This wasn't an event like the Expos of the last Noughties, where people played on the old machines and bought a game or two if any were on offer. This was a raw, sweaty, BO-soaked geekfest. It was an audience high on the allure of the 'rarity' of the games they were buying. They had come prepared to spend, to spend their entire wage packet on a single game perhaps. And, as a games collector, it's hard not to get swept up in that.

But I can't help but feel that this wave of buyers for 'hot' games is illusory. To take an obvious example, do you believe that if you spend £250 on A Rose In The Twilight for the PS Vita that it will increase in value? If we know one thing about history, it's that it repeats itself. Forty years from now, isn't it more likely that, if there's a 2062 Gaming Market, you're going to find it for sale in a cardboard box of old PS Vita games for the equivalent of £3 each, precisely like the Castle Of Gems BBC tape I picked up for that price? Think about it.

Now, in no way should that detract from the success of the event itself. Clearly, we are where we are. Game collecting has gone from being a hobby indulged in by a few computer weirdos 'stuck in the past' to something which more and more people want to invest in. Replay Events are catering to that demand, and in bringing together so many exhibitors in one place, Replay seem to not only have created something of a mania, but a self-fulfilling one, where collectors are quite literally scrabbling over each other to get those 'hot' items that 'everybody' wants. Some collectors have resigned themselves to the fact that this hobby, although it remains enjoyable, is certainly no longer cheap.

What I say is: Tip-toe around events like the London Gaming Market. Observe what's going on carefully. Don't get carried away, don't buy games for systems you don't even own just because the price is a few pounds cheaper than what it sold for on eBay. Seek out the systems you collect for, and if the prices are fantastically high, pivot to collecting for a system ten years older.

If you go to the London Gaming Market, you're definitely going to enjoy it and you're definitely going to emerge with a lighter wallet. Not getting carried away is the difference between coming away from it with a good haul of games that you're actually going to play, rather than just one or two of them that you'll just put on a shelf as ornaments.

Read more about this event and future ones at: https://www.londongamingmarket.com/