ZZAP! Live 2026

Introduction

We are proud to announce our ZZAP! Live 2026 event and in addition, a new venue - The Village Hotel in Coventry. We have done a "level up" to this premium venue with swimming pool, gym, spa, Starbucks and Flame Grill restaurant. Oh yes, we are also covering the parking this time, so there will be 200+ FREE car parking spaces. If you want to stay over, the hotel has 150+ rooms.

Village Hotel

The ZZAP! Live event will cover each and every Commodore system including the Amiga family and include many other retro systems for guests to play including Sega, Nintendo and various other systems. We will also have a room full of retro arcade machines.

Tickets: 

• Standard Event Ticket - Saturday ONLY - 10am to 6pm to all the event has to offer
• VIP Ticket - Friday evening, Saturday and Saturday evening activities. Plus you will get access to the main event hall and traders from 9:30am (30 minutes earlier) and receive a VIP lanyard. VIP ticket holders will get 15% off items on the Fusion Retro Books stall. The 150 ticket holders will be put into a raffle to win a Starlight Commodore 64 from Commodore International. This Ticket is limited to 175 attendees. We hope to announce further benefits of being a VIP - discussions are underway.

The event comprises of three parts - Friday evening, the main Saturday event and Saturday evening activities.

Friday Evening: The plan is to have an activity in the Q/A room from 7:30pm, at the moment this is: "An evening with Gary Bracey and friends - the Ocean Software Story".

Saturday: the day time main event starts at 10am and finishes at 6.00pm. You will have access to all that the event has to offer during this time:

• Over 75+ Commodore systems to play games on. Every Commodore system will be represented from the Commodore PET up to the Amiga 4000.
• A Fusion Zone where non-Commodore systems will be available to play: Sega consoles, PlayStation, Saturn, N64, DOS gaming and more!
• We have a dedicated Q/A room that will hold up to 160 attendees along with the panel - a selection of talks will take place throughout Saturday. It will be here that the Friday and Saturday events will take place.
• We will have many arcade machines to play on and in addition we will have some LCD pinball machines.
• There will be a fully licenced bar throughout the day, and good value food available to purchase in the Flame Grill restaurant and in-house Starbucks.

Saturday Evening: At 7pm we will be starting the evening slot in the Q/A room. We are calling these the Indie talks where you meet some Indie teams and hear their story and are able to ask them questions. An example is a talk with the developers of Sherwood - an amazing new game on the Commodore 64, published by Psytronik. These will go until 10:30pm or so.

Guests

We have some great guests lined up including :

• Graftgold (Uridium, Paradroid, Rainbow Islands, Fire and Ice and more)
  • Andrew Braybrook 
  • Steve Turner 

• Sensible Software (Sensible Soccer, Cannon Fodder)
  • Stoo Cambridge 
  • Jon Hare

• Ocean Software
  • Gary Bracey
  • Simon Butler
  • Paul Hughes
  • Andrew Sleigh
  • Colin Porch
  • Lee Cowley
  • Barry Leitch
  • Matthew Cannon
    
    
• DMA Design
  • Mike Dailly (Lemmings, Lemmings 2, Hired Guns, GTA & lots more)
  • Steve Hammond (Ballistix, C64 Shadow of the Beast, PC Lemmings, Hired Guns story, Level Editor Lynx Lemmings & lots more)
  • Brian Watson (Lemmings, Menace, Hired Guns & lots more).

• Matt Gray - C64 Musician
  
• Fred Gray C64 and Amiga Musician
  
• Rob Hubbard - C64 Musician
  
• Andrew Barnabas - C64 and Amiga Musician
  
• Christian Simpson - Perifractic, CEO of Commodore International
  
• Simon Pick - games developer (Narc)
• Tony Warriner (Beneath a Steel Sky)
• Jeff Minter (Llamasoft)

• Nigel Parkinson - The Beano illustrator with his colouring partner.

We have asked many others and are waiting for confirmation before announcing.

Tickets

Ticket sales will not be refunded or transferred from 2 weeks before the event and thereafter.

Children Under 3 are FREE - they do not need a ticket.

Tickets will also be sold on the door but will be 15% more expensive than pre-paid tickets.

Parking

Your ticket will give you a complimentary free car parking space - on a first come first served basis. 

Hotel Rooms

The hotel has 150 rooms - book now for great value rooms. Book your room HERE

Badges and Event Magazine:

For this event, everyone will get a small token magazine on entry. 

RAFFLE

The raffles at our events are extremely popular. 

We are grateful to Commodore International for donating a FOUNDERS EDITION Commodore 64 to the raffle. 

More announcements of guests and raffle items to follow, plus what to expect at the event.