of something for everyone, whether they’re into cosplay, retro consoles, streamers, or just want to play a selection of the latest or most popular games (and camp out in the NEC rather than outside) After selling his Multiplay business to Game in 2015


and helping to establish it’s Belong esports centres (which were spun out and sold to Vindex in July 2020), the only question for Fletcher after he left the retailer in 2017 was whether he would one day create a new event to compete with Insomnia, or would be able to find a way to get it back. “Yeah, one way or another, Insomnia events were


going to come back. It was either gonna be that I work with someone to buy back the business, or I was gonna start it again, just for the community. “We’ve actually looked at getting the events business


back a couple of times,” adds Fletcher, who recognised that Player1 Events lacked a reason for being once Game’s Belong venture was seen to be established. “It’s always a very emotional thing when you sell a business, especially one that you’ve built from the ground up, and a family business, as it was” he says, recalling all the plans that went unrealised when the events half of Multiplay was sent to live at Game’s Basingstoke HQ. (The other half keeping the name before being sold on to Unity). “I was wanting to grow it even bigger than it was, you know, there were all these things to do.” Then COVID came along, and as the shutters went down on in-person game events, Fletcher saw an opportunity for when they would inevitably come back up again. “It was about saving the events for


the community and then thinking there’s an opportunity to come out at the other end of the pandemic and rekindle the global ambitions and to take Insomnia to everyone around the world.”


FIRST WE TAKE BIRMINGHAM Although a summer Insomnia has already been penciled in, plans for


April 2022 MCV/DEVELOP | 49


global domination will have to wait until the reports are in from April’s event, just to be sure that the demand for it is there. Fletcher is confident that it will be: “Because we didn’t bring Insomnia back to just keep it going as it was, we bought it back because we see huge potential for live events, and particularly for the games industry. Certainly the anecdotal evidence, and the statistical evidence, shows people really want to get back to live events. People have suffered a lot in the last two years, of not having that human contact, of not having the festival experiences and not going and meeting your mates and sharing your passions. It’s clear there’s a need and a demand. “In all honesty, we need to just run it to see where the


land lies, to see how it’s gonna run, who’s going to come, which industries are ready, because some still are not. There’s a lot of moratoriums on events in some cases. But we were going to run an Insomnia come hell or high water to get the community back together again, so they can come back and start getting back to normal, because going to Insomnia was a regular feature of their calendar, and, we hope, will be again.


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