GAMESFEST
Mark Lucas, co-founder of the Tring-based convention, talks about attracting a mainstream audience to Hertfordshire, why X-Wing and D&D are the perfect games for the show, and plans for the event’s tenth anniversary in 2017
For those who may not know, what
is GamesFest?
Our tagline is: ‘A collective to bring you the best in gaming, collectables and comics.’ It’s based on our yearly convention but we also run gaming days. We plan to start reviewing games and hopefully branch out into distribution and production.
How did the event come about?
As with most things in life, it started by accident. We organised a day of Magic: The Gathering in early 2007 and for some reason called it GamesFest. After that we ran our first proper convention in November. The rest is history…
How has it changed over the years?
It’s changed a lot! We went from our local Victoria Hall – our spiritual home – to the Watford Colosseum in 2009. It was a massive show. We had had some very famous guests; Steve Jackson, Jervis Johnson and James Swallow, to name but a few. We had all the major gaming companies: Mantic, Games Workshop, Flames of War, Mongoose. We had re-enactors; we had pretty much everything. It was a great day and everything you could want from a major convention. We had made it but, for some reason, we didn’t do one the following year. In retrospect, it was really the difficulty of juggling full-time jobs and planning and running a convention.