CHANGING THE FORMAT


Simran Whitham talks to Vince Pavey about Manchester’s big games industry night out


FORMAT is the UK’s biggest games industry nightlife event, and brings together game developers, content creators, industry press and the public together for a night of networking, celebration and video games in Manchester multiple times a year. It was created by Simran Whitham, a


game developer, marketing professional and business builder from the area, and he’s taken the time to tell us all about the path his passion project has been on, and how it has grown.


Simran Whitham


Photo credits: Widerfocus Photography


How did the idea for FORMAT come about? Like many great businesses and ideas, FORMAT started off as a one off I hosted in the summer during my first year of study at Futureworks. I originally just wanted to host a gamer meetup in a bar, but it saw over 100 attendees. From there it became a monthly event called Manchester Gamers Unite. One of the key issues I’ve always had


40 | MCV/DEVELOP April/May 2023


with mainstream industry events from a young age is you tend to discover a lack of unification and community. There’s no real event that aims to put gamers, game developers and content creators on the same level. At FORMAT’s second event I saw a group of gamers talking to developers from Cloud Imperium as equals and it made me realise that we had created the truly special environment that I’d wanted from more mainstream events. I also noticed at the time that there wasn’t a


dedicated industry event involving a nightlife element for developers, which I always felt was a huge missed opportunity given the versatile nature of video games and gaming culture. So, from our small meetup hosted at Dive


NQ in Manchester, we started growing. FORMAT is now much bigger, and is based at the iconic Manchester venue Impossible MCR, where we will now have three whole floors of game studio headliners at each event.


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