Our first guest announcement for PLAY Expo Blackpool 2025 is here!

We are absolutely over-the-moon to announce legendary hardware designer RJ Mical will be flying over the the states to join us. 

RJ has a long career which dates back to the 1980's where he worked for Williams and one of the games he worked on was Sinistar which will be playable in our arcade this year! He is best known for his work on the Commodore Amiga, Atari Lynx and 3DO computers and consoles. More recently he worked for Sony on the PlayStation 3 and PS Vita consoles. He is currently Director of games at Google.

In true RJ style, he penned a special message for everyone...

"Hi. RJ Mical here. Since I was very young I've had a fascination with logic and mathematics. It's funny that no one ever noticed this about me. I mean, I built my own tic-tac-toe playing computer when I was fourteen years old. But this side of me was never encouraged. Instead, I grew up thinking I was a loser, because that's what the people closest to me were saying.

How about you? Have you got undiscovered skills?

Then I found video games. I connect the dots from that first Intellivision I touched, to my experience developing video arcade games, to joining Amiga computer, to the rest of my career, to doing game research for DeepMind at Google.

Once upon a time they taunted me, "What are you going to do, earn a living creating games for computers?" As if.

I started out with nothing, had to work hard to for most everything I've accomplished. Same as you, yes? We're all in this together, aren't we. I hope you are having as much fun as I am."

We will confirm dates and times closer to the event for RJ's talk.