Capital ideas

As it reaches its tenth anniversary, London Games Festival is expanding its horizons

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Make London the games capital of the world. This was the brief that Michael French was handed by City Hall when he joined Film London in 2015, to set up its videogame division. Since then, his primary responsibility has been the annual London Games Festival, a sprawling week-long affair that spans BAFTA's Games Awards, public exhibits in Trafalgar Square and experimental art-game showcase Now Play This. (And, once upon a time, EGX Rezzed and its successor WASD, before the latter's organiser went into liquidation in 2024.) Across April 2-13, London Games Festival is returning for its tenth edition (it has not missed a year, and even carried on during the pandemic). To mark the milestone it is launching New Game Plus, a 'boutique games expo' stepping into the gap left by WASD. We catch up with French during the festival preparations to find out: after a decade as the head of Games London, how well does he feel he's fulfilled that brief? "London is already the games capital of Europe," he says. "It's become that over the last ten years." Indeed, according to industry trade body UKIE's Gamesmap resource, there are currently 708 active game companies in Greater London and that's not counting the nearby development hubs of Guildford and Brighton. But while LGF brought in a record 100,000 attendees last year, French is the first to admit that the event doesn't quite reflect its home city's position on the global stage: "It's a strange thing, right? London is the games capital of Europe in [terms of] workforce, but our festival is not at the same scale as a Gamescom. And we do ask ourselves, why is that?”