FIRST CONTACTS The foundations for Bastion’s success were laid over the course of five formative years during which Barrett worked first at magazine publisher VNU, before joining hardware giant Commodore’s marketing agency as it prepared to launch the Amiga 500 in 1987. “I got to know Steve Franklin (Commodore
UK’s MD) very closely and he invited me to become marketing manager. I worked on the Amiga, and while doing that, met a load of games companies while putting together game bundles.” This was when four or five hit games were compiled onto cassette or disk and given grand titles like They Sold A Million, which put Barrett in close contact with the likes of Ocean and US Gold, the UK’s triple-A publishers at the time. “That got me interested in the games industry because that seemed to be where the fun was.” In 1989 Barrett briefly returned to magazines,
joining EMAP as its head of marketing as the publisher was preparing to pitch for an official Nintendo magazine. It was there that Barrett was invited to join Ocean, “So I went up to Manchester and spent two years there. But I always remembered the agency days and just thought I’d start my own.” Barrett called on Ciaran Brennan, one of his editor contacts at EMAP who had moved into PR, and in the same month that the seminal Championship Manager arrived, so too did Bastion.
SHADOW OF THE BEASTS In 1992 games PR was as different to today as the tech and media landscape it served. Nothing was data driven, with focus groups, favour and gut instinct powering most videogame decision making. Magazines were the only influencers of the day, and, of course, there were far less of them than the content channels we endure now. Mobile phones had no utility beyond making expensive calls, and the internet, such as it was, was equally unevolved. As for the games, they were far from becoming the aspirational playthings Sony would help make mainstream.
The big PR beasts of the early 1990s were the in-house teams - Sega, Nintendo, and on PC, Virgin Interactive. Brennan, who left Bastion in 2005 (and is currently the communications director at Sports Interactive) recalls only a handful of independent agencies specialising in games at the time, “People like Simon Harvey at Barrington Harvey had been around for quite some time, but generally the landscape was very small. But then the games business was as well. There were loads of independent publishers and hardware manufacturers. We’d leave work on a Friday having ten clients then come in on Monday morning and four of them would have merged.”
RED ALERT Without any investors Bastion experienced a slow start that was hand-to-mouth in some respects. Brennan remembers having to rely on freelance writing to supplement his PR income. “It was a slow start,” admits Barrett “‘92 to 93
was a bit painful, then things started to take off.” Bastion was soon contracted to Virgin, which at the time published two of the biggest games on PC, Command & Conquer and Doom. Joining the team initially to work on the account was another EMAP veteran, whose first week was spent trying to come up with creative ways to get the press to write about Doom 2. “It was decided - I think it was Ciaran’s idea
- to bike jiffy bags of offal to news editors on national newspapers,” recalls Simon Byron (now publishing director at Yogscast). “As well as to celebrate the goriness of the game, we were trying to get wider coverage.” It worked. By way of recognition, Bastion’s Doom 2 campaign was later voted second-worst PR stunt of the year. “My first week on the job ended with me picking the phone up to the police. I passed them onto someone else very quickly.”
GREATNESS AWAITS Also around this time the ink was drying on a deal that saw Sony acquire Psygnosis, the Liverpool-based developer founded by the late Ian Hetherington and Jonathan Ellis, who upon finalising the deal in New York, flew back to London and called Barrett to join them for
September 2022 MCV/DEVELOP | 19
Bastion circa 1993, or possibly 1893
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