Apparently, the Scottish Games Network is officially 21 today.
If SGN were a person, that means we are a cool three years past our first legal pint, well over our wild teenage years, and firmly staring down the barrel of responsible adulthood. In games terms, twenty-one years is not just a milestone – it is roughly several geological ages.
When SGN was born in May 2005, it was a purely social community. A Yahoo Group, if you can believe it, focused on helping the rapidly growing games community in Scotland find each other.
I’ll let that sink in. A Yahoo Group (RIP)
In the late-90s, Scotland was home to SIX games pioneers. The folks at DMA Design had Lemmings under their belt. Glasgow’s Red Lemon and Inner Workings were working on games such as Aeronauts and Plane Crazy. Creative Edge had a major success with Baldies, which was big in Japan and Dunfermline’s VIS had the pioneering voxel game H.E.D.Z. in development… Just as importantly, Abertay was starting to produce the world’s first games graduates. All of a sudden, not everyone knew (or had worked with) everyone else.
SGN started as an online space to connect a fragmented community of developers, artists, and studios who were busy building the future in their spare rooms and out of the way offices.
For two decades, the Scottish Games Network has been the voice of that community. We have spent twenty-one years fighting to prove that games are not just toys, distractions, or a niche pastime. They are a primary creative and economic driver, capable of delivering immense value to Scotland.
And We Won That Argument.
We have spent two decades mapping the ecosystem and doing our best to make its brilliance visible.
Earlier this year, our strategic blueprint, Level Up: The National Games Action Plan (GAP), received unanimous cross-party support in the Scottish Parliament. With key MSP allies – like Clare Adamson and Michael Marra – returning to Holyrood this month, providing immediate political continuity, we are ready to move the GAP from advocacy to action.
However, we are also at a massive window of opportunity that cannot be wasted. While the recent support from the UK Government has provided a welcome funding foundation, Scotland can now build on this. We need only look at countries and regions like Turkey, Malta, Portugal, and Indonesia, which are doing brilliant, highly strategic work treating games as a core national asset. We cannot afford to fall behind.
The good news? We do not need another 12-18 month research programme or a scoping study to tell us what we already know. We have the entire plan ready to go. De-risked. Debated. Done.
SGN 2.0: Project Press Start
This victory means that the mandate of the Scottish Games Network has fundamentally changed. We are no longer a community forum or an advocacy lobby. We are transitioning SGN into something wholly new. We are building the machinery to productise our talent-scouting capability (through Hello World! ), map our collective ecosystem intelligence into a robust CRM, and establish our strategic boundaries (Scotland vs. the wider UK vs. International Markets), with games as an innovation driver (through More Than Games), not just a successful consumer market.
This is not just about supporting game developers. It is about architecting the Interaction Economy. We are talking about capturing an untapped £1.3 billion in cross-sector GVA by treating games-native technology – simulation logic, real-time 3D, digital twins, and interactive design – as a national public utility.
We are already proving what this looks like in practice, with plans and partners now discussing new funding opportunities and projects to apply games in new ways and in new spaces, bring playful thinking to organisations where ‘fun’ is only event the start of the word ‘functional’ and making games relevant to the rest of the world.
The Era of Invisibility is Over
This whole vision cannot be delivered by a lone advocate. It is a national (and potentially international) infrastructure project, which could use Scotland as the ‘innovation lab’ for the global games ecosystem.
To take this Scottish vision outward to the world, I need help. I want to build a pool of exceptional, forward-thinking talent that SGN can tap into as we grow and scale. We are looking for good people with expertise in operations, commercial partnerships, events, funding, business development strategy, and media/content.
This is an open invitation to the whole games ecosystem (in Scotland and beyond). SGN needs you. If you are a developer, an educator, a student, a service studio, a content creator, or a policy maker, we need your voice, your ideas, and your energy. How do we build this next phase together?
To everyone who was there in the original Yahoo Group (there are a few of us), and to everyone who has built a game, taught a class, or supported our vision over the last 21 years: thank you. Let’s make the next 21 all about the fun (and games).