We have had the privilage to interview Jason who owns and runs a great website called Retro Games. Here is the full interview

So then tell our readers a bit about yourself.
Yeah no problem. Im Jason Moore and im 37 and from Milton Keynes

Tell us a bit about your website
I run www.retrogames.co.uk  While retrogames, retrogamer, and retrogaming are common terms now, until we started advertising in 1995, the words retro and games weren’t associated. The retrogames site started back in 1997, primarily to list all our inventory for sale, and to help guide people to the Retrogames magazine which was enjoying success at the time. The last issue of the Retrogames magazine was in 2004, but the site continues to grow, and now has biggest inventory of classic games and machines for sale on the web

What made you want to start this website?
When retrogames started in 1995 as a magazine, I started listing games at the back, and helped improve my own collection by selling and trading them. That part of the magazine grew and grew, before long I was making 30 page catalogs and sending them out to hundreds of collectors every few months. The internet was a brilliant replacement for this process, initially our site was full of static lists of games, but now the retail part of the site has grown into a massive shop.

Wow, with that in mind, do you think that retro games market is coming back and do you expect growth in sales?
I’m not sure the retrogames market is growing, or just moving up a generation or two. We had Retrogames retail shop in London back in 1999, but ended up closing it a couple of years later, as there just wasn’t the market out there to support it. Back in the late 1990s, 8-bit cassette games were really popular, now it just seems to be hardcore collectors who want them. Now it is Megadrive and SNES games, and even Playstation games which are more popular with the mainstream. For years i’ve been comparing classic games to classic toys, and they’re still quite similar markets, but there’s definite scope for classic gaming to boom, particularly if we end up in a games ‘download’ culture. Then, the only physical gaming products left will be retro

Why should people buy from your site and not ebay or Amazon?
We do also have an ebay shop for our secondary items, but as a collector myself, i’ve long been frustrated with unreliable sellers and poorly listed descriptions on ebay. And of course, no guarantees. I make sure that all our customers are happy with their purchase, we send parcels every day, and we always try to be as helpful as possible. We actually also used to have a portal on Amazon back in the late 1990s, but it didn’t generate many sales at that time. Recent experiences of third party sellers on amazon aren’t good, with incredibly slow despatch, and virtually no support or communication. I’d much rather trade on our own good reputation than that of amazon or ebay. I have at least a couple of emails a week from customers saying what a breath of fresh air we are to deal with in comparison. I haven’t found one person yet who hasn’t got an ebay horror story to tell.

Ok then Jason, tell me a bit about your gaming background
I’ve played games since I was a little kid, collected them for over twenty five years. I live and breath games, but I wish i’d had a life creating them, rather than writing about them and dealing in them. I have my own history as a gamer on our site:
www.retrogames.co.uk/html/history_of_retrogames.html 

What consoles do you own?
Pretty much every console ever made of course, bar an Entex Adventurevision, but one day

Lets hope so. What are your favourite games?
I’m really enjoying Race Driver Grid at the moment. I’ve always loved the TOCA series, and its not the graphics or the flashy front end, it’s just the racing is so close, and so intense. It is a work of genius!

What are your favourite retro games then?
Too many to list, here’s a few that spring to mind: Dungeon Master, Exile, Wings of Fury, Turrican (all Amiga), Software Star, Highway Encounter, Laser Squad (Spectrum), Paperboy, Choplifter, Out Run, Track & Field, (Arcade), Pilot Wings, Mario Kart (SNES), Excitebike, Metroid (NES), Galaga 88 (PC Engine), oh, I could go on forever. Currently i’m very excited about pinball machines

What are you most looking foward to?
The end of loading times, why can’t they make a 360 DVD drive spin as fast as those on PCs? Also looking forward to Little Big Planet, New Banjo Kazooie, GTAV.