Game Republic New Horizons was an impressive power play for the north | Opinion

The south tends to dominate things in the United Kingdom. London in particular tends to suck in all the jobs and opportunities like a black hole. And of course, the UK’s premier games industry conference, Develop, is about as far south as you can get, located on the (sometimes) sunny shores of Brighton.

Look at a map of UK games companies, and you’ll see London appears like a giant red sun. But there are plenty of smaller suns elsewhere in the country – and many of those more northern suns are pretty tired by now of travelling hundreds of miles south every time they want to press hands on a business deal or network with their industry peers. Newcastle’s GameHorizon event, latterly produced by GamesIndustry.biz, strove to support the northern end of the nation, but proved unsustainable and ceased in 2014. More recently, Develop:North didn’t return after its 2024 debut, leaving locals to choose between Develop:Brighton to the south or DICE Europe to the north.

Enter New Horizons. The games business network Game Republic, co-directed by Dr Jackie Mulligan and Jamie Sefton, has been tirelessly promoting games companies in the north for well over a decade, putting on around a dozen events every year attended by members such as Team17 and Radical Forge. But New Horizons is their big play for a Develop-style conference of national importance.

Judging by the turnout there this week, they might be on to something.

The conference kicked off on Wednesday evening with a VIP reception on the rooftop terrace of Double Eleven’s HQ in Middlesbrough: an impressively kitted-out building that elicited no small amount of jealous oohs and aahs from the attendees. In a packed lecture theatre, Mulligan laid out the ambition: this conference wasn’t just for people in the north, it was for everyone in the UK.

The key will be persuading those London types to actually get on a train heading north. Looking around the room, this inaugural event was still mostly dominated by more local folk, like representatives from Tanglewood Games and Observer Interactive. But the speaker, Lasse Seppänen, general manager of Supercell’s London office, had been persuaded to escape the event horizon of Essex – and perhaps more will follow his lead in future years as news of the conference spreads.

The main event on Thursday took place at Middlesbrough FC’s Riverside Stadium, which made for a novel and rather impressive conference venue. A series of glass-fronted meeting rooms provided glorious views of the pristine pitch, and the linear layout of the stadium ended up working in the conference’s favour. The meeting rooms and cafeteria were located in the centre, with the main stage and a smaller room for talks at either end, meaning attendees were guaranteed to naturally pass by each other as they moved from one event to the next: perfect for networking and impromptu chats. The one downside was that the expo area – a handful of demos of upcoming games – was stranded beyond the fringes of the secondary talks room, meaning it was seldom visited as far as I could see.

The varied talks on offer were well-curated, with fireside chats about hot topics such as transmedia and the importance of international markets like China, as well as an interview with Axel Torvenius from MachineGames about the making of Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. The only slightly confusing booking was a chat between GamesIndustry.biz alumnus Chris Dring and Taskmaster contestant Maisie Adam at the end of the day.

Dring admitted at the start that he wasn’t quite sure why a games business journalist was interviewing a comedian – and Adam cheerfully admitted she knew very little about video games. The pair gamely spent the next half hour or so trying to find links between the world of comedy and gaming – with only partial success – before finally submitting to a very sweary round of EA Sports FC. It was a strange end to a games business conference, but a funny one, nonetheless.

All in all, the sold-out conference provided a solid start to what will hopefully be an annual event: early bird tickets are already on sale for next year at the heavily discounted price of £89 to tempt early adopters. And if anything will persuade southerners to make the trip up north, it’s the relative bang for their buck they’ll get after paying through the nose for similar conferences elsewhere. Anyone who has scrambled to secure Brighton accommodation at eye-watering prices ahead of Develop will be pleasantly surprised by the reasonableness of hotels in the north east.

Perhaps it will be enough. And perhaps New Horizons will help to shift the centre of gravity of the UK’s gaming industry that bit further north. But even if the southerners don’t come, the north now has an event to be proud of.