Like Indiana Jones once said, “I think it’s time to ask yourself; what do you believe in?” and as we draw our month-long celebration of vintage video gaming and its influences to a close, it’s time to ask ourselves if we achieved what we wanted, and think about what we drew from the experience.

If you missed it, earlier this month I wrote a piece about the ‘power of fun’ and what that means to a creative businesses. We raised some key thoughts around staff motivation, business objectives, company marketability and the focus on new work. Our month-long celebration of retro gaming (#16bitDreams) was an initiative formed by our studio to cover all those incredibly important things. So, as we put the shutters down for now, did we achieve all those things?…

Yes. Well I’m obviously not going to say no. Here’s my justifications though:

Our main objective as a business was to achieve 2 main criteria:

1) Talk about our skills and abilities as a studio with our key audiences in an engaging way, and
2) Do all that in a format that displays the personality of our team and brand

All of us here lose our minds at the sight of a retro gaming console and our clients do too (check 1). We are all also able to recognise as a team where our abilities lie (check 2). So… using retro gaming as a format to talk about the areas of the business that we specialise in should be straight forward then right? I’m happy to report, they were.

When I was 10 someone very wise (my Mum) said something pretty profound:

‘Smile Paul and the world smiles with you’.

It’s true though! We try not to call clients ‘clients’ here but ‘partners’ simply because that’s the way we view what we do. We want to grow businesses alongside our own and most importantly, have fun doing it. No-one ever said:

“I want to come to work and feel so bored I want to go home again”

This is the point where as I’m writing this I put on ‘Mighty Wings by Cheap Trick’ in the studio as I’m going into the big crescendo…

#16bitDreams wasn’t created as a one off and it definitely wasn’t aimed at being perceived as ‘cool’ so our current and potential clients might buy into that. It also wasn’t created as a team building initiative so that we could all have an excuse to create outreach.

The value of #16bitDreams is an extension of what permanently exists in the studio. We have fun on a daily basis with the work we do and the clients we work with. If it wasn’t #16bitDreams maybe it would be an initiative about food, fashion, sport or film - they’re all areas that we also have a hefty passion for internally.

My point is, we created an idea based around something we all love and we invited people that we thought would feel the same to engage with it.

Last week we held our retro gaming event at Texture in Manchester where we held a Mario Kart and Street Fighter tournament. I had a bad head the next day but… I do clearly remember over 60 creatives from Manchester laughing, cheering and talking to each other. With almost 80 guests registered in 9 days for an event that we created completely out of the blue I’d say that was a great example of what we do as a company. Have fun with people we already work with and build relationships the right way with the people we want to be working with in the future.

Here’s to the next #16bitDreams!