London Games Festival is a four-day event that runs from the 14th April to the 18th April 2026. Combining many different events including talks from the gaming industry to its newest addition, New Games Plus, a two-day indie game event showcasing a plethora of upcoming indie games, it promises to include something for everyone.
Michael French MBE (Festival Director) very kindly spared some time to talk with us about the London Games Festival and New Games Plus. In the following interview, we delve into how he became involved with the festival, what the London Games Festival actually is, how New Games Plus came to be and much more.
If you would like more or to book tickets for the event, you can visit the London Games Festival website for that information.
I would love to start with a little introduction to you and your gaming history.
Games have been an important part of my life since I was very, very young. My dad brought them into the house first via ‘80s machines like the VIC-20 and the Amiga. They were a staple of my growing up: I loved the 16-bit consoles, spent too many Saturdays at an arcade in East London that had an imported Street Fighter II machine, and read as many games mags as I could. The usual stuff, I think, for many I think – but I really was obsessed. And while I lapsed out of games entirely for a few years, I got back into them as a student; I even ended up writing about video games for the student paper at university and even co-editing a fanzine on games culture. Professionally, I started working in games as an editorial assistant at MCV back in the early 2000s when it was a weekly ‘newspaper’ that pretty much everyone in the UK games industry read.
How did you get involved with running London Games Festival?
By 2015 I had become publisher of MCV and needed a new challenge. I saw an ad on our own online job board with only a few scant details, but I had a hunch it was for the festival. At that point there had been a previous version of the event, but it was effectively retired, and I was aware of behind-the-scenes efforts to reboot it and deliver a new programme to support the games industry in London, which was itself having a resurgence. And as someone who grew up in and around London, it felt like a culmination of some key things – my love of games and my affection for the city itself.
For anyone who isn’t aware, what actually is London Games Festival?
LGF is a city-wide event – which means we run and encourage things to take place across the UK capital – that celebrates games and acknowledges their cultural impact. We’re supported by the Mayor of London – and starting this year the UK government too – which gives us a remit to do things that actively support the games industry but have a measurable impact.
So the events and activities include showcases, industry events, talks and so on, because these are ways to bring people together and help them raise awareness or do business. But we have a cultural brief too, so we also keep our eye on how we can support the promotion of new talent and new ideas and introduce new audiences to games.
LGF is delivered by Games London – part of the city’s screen agency, Film London. Games London is what I am ultimately in charge of and we have a number of very targeted programmes outside of LGF also that are designed to help the industry – accelerators, trade missions, and a new toolkit for independent developers – but we get to feature a lot of that during the festival too
Part of the festival is New Games Plus, a showcase event for upcoming or newly released indie games. This is quite a new event, so why was it created and incorporated into LGF?
When we first started everything, all our events were either for industry or aimed at a mainstream non-games audience. For the latter, we want to change perceptions around games, so we produced a showcase in Trafalgar Square which was visited by tens of thousands of people per day. We part-funded an event called Now Play This at Somerset House, another central place with great footfall, that was focused on experimental games. We didn’t have to do ‘an expo’ because there was a really strong core gaming / consumer-facing partner event timed with the festival called Rezzed. But that ultimately went away, and its replacement WASD only ran for two years.
We found ourselves in late 2024 heading towards a festival we’d announced with no public showcase element for people to just come and play new stuff. New Game Plus was born out of that, but my vision was to build a public showcase with a much more curated line-up. Something more comfortable is being – and this might seem like a strange word for it – more intimate or at least a more personal way to present new games. April 2025 was the pilot version, and it immediately became an invaluable part of our mission, attracting an audience that cut across the public, students and industry.
How long does it take to organise a show like this, and what kind of challenges does it bring?
It’s a year-round effort, but as with any show, there is a real peak and a lot of deadlines as we get in the last one or two months before the opening day. We’re publicly funded, so we have to invest responsibly in our programme with outputs in mind – we can’t just book out a huge venue, as it’s risky and wasteful. Awareness is another challenge – we have a good reputation, but it takes time to build credibility – you can’t buy that at all. We’re also just one event in a calendar of major global events, so developers have a lot of good options beyond what we do. The other challenge is sometimes just purely logistical: we’re a small team – very effective, if I do say so myself! – but have multiple events overlapping, so we need to be organised and nimble.
The event showcases a vast amount of indie games; the curation of the titles to feature must be quite the challenge, especially with so many indie games vying for attention.
We have a few things in place to manage that. Ultimately it’s a few different filters and groups that come together to give us a great line-up of fresh games. At the heart of New Game Plus is our Official Selection of games, where we send out a call to curate and select games ourselves – my team and I spend a lot of time looking at submissions starting in October/November, and yes, we do have to turn a lot of them down. We also have delegation and international partners from other territories we work with who select the best games from their region. And then New Game Plus is lucky to have additional exhibitors from a few of the really cool publishers and bigger publisher-developers like Devolver Digital – whom you can trust to pick good games.
The event moved locations for this year’s show. Was it just a case of demand and needing a bigger floor space?
We ran the first New Game Plus at the decommissioned site for the old London Museum – the museum itself is moving to a new space, and in the meantime its old premises were up for venue hire. While I’d have happily gone back there – what a great setting! – It’s no longer available, and we certainly did need more space; we packed a lot into NGP25. So this year we’re on the other side of town at Exhibition White City, which is a relatively new venue. It has a bigger all-in-one show floor and stage space under one roof.
If you were asked which games are a must to visit during New Game Plus, which titles would you recommend?
A tricky one, as we have nearly 100 games to play, and they’re all ‘new IP’ with fresh ideas – they’re all equally important to me! What I would say is that we have a real variety. While everything is probably considered ‘indie’, that’s too broad a way to describe what we have, which are more fresh games on display than anywhere else and a mix of moods and styles. We’ve also got a great mix of new teams amongst some established “indie+” studios like 4J Studios, Double Fine, Ustwo Games, Herobeat and so on. Sorry for the cop-out answer!
Moving over to the festival itself, what other events are happening that people can attend?
There’s a very exciting range of events looking at experimental games – Strange Play, Play Praxis and others – plus a big performance by the London Video Game Orchestra. For industry professionals we have conferences on self-publishing and a long-running part of our schedule called Screen Play, which digs into the convergence and crossovers between games and films. Everyone curious can see these and more on the website or our festival portal.
What’s the long-term vision for the festival? With video game events struggling over the years, especially since Covid, have you tried to put in any safeguards to try and protect London Games Festival?
Certainly, video game events of all sizes and types – including some of the partner events I’ve mentioned – have had challenges in the backdrop to our first decade. We’ve actually done ok and not been as heavily impacted, if at all – arguably because we are culture-first. Games is a fast-changing industry in general, and events as a sub-category of that are often at the whim of economic factors both within the games industry and external to it. We’re grateful for the support we have from local and the national government, which means we have a tighter focus, but it gives us certainty.
As for the vision: in the first few years, my job was very much about mapping around what was already happening – building something that adapted to things like Rezzed and Now Play This and the BAFTA Games Awards. Now, and partly due to the new level of support from the national government, the plan is to go from having built a very strong foundation to an expanded audience and then stick a flag in the ground as the epicentre of UK video games. Bringing more of our programming together at one venue is the next logical step for us to do that as we keep scaling up. London is a big city but short on appropriate showcase spaces of a certain size, so you have to wait for things to have availability, which I think we have for 2027. Watch this space on that.
And in a wider sense, the vision is about building a centre of gravity for everyone that is useful and enjoyable to players and professionals. We’re very much becoming the main event each year for the UK games industry – we have fantastic industry-only events – but LGF cuts through into the public sphere.
Just to finish on a brighter note, can you give us some of your favourite games you’ve played over the years?
I was asked to pick a top five recently, and it pained me to narrow it down. My hero games as a kid were the LucasArts ones – Secret of Monkey Island, Fate of Atlantis, Sam and Max… Later on in my console era I was all about Metal Gear Solid and Snake Eater. When time allows, nothing beats sinking into a big epic game – I’ve really enjoyed the Final Fantasy VII remakes lately – but also shorter, puzzle games I find especially useful to ‘snack’ on – Drop 7, Threes, and most recently Is This Seat Taken?
