THE RAPTOR FACTOR
Hatched during lockdown, Raptor PR has quickly found its happy hunting ground in B2B comms for games industry and media brands. Richie Shoemaker speaks to founder Rana Rahman about what the agency might get its teeth into next
A
wide-eyed, ebullient love of games is not something that is all that common in the UK
games industry - at least not the circles MCV tends to frequent. Sure, some will share their excitement over the release of a new Pokémon game, or berate the direction of travel for the latest Sonic, but we mainly find that many that have long made games their business have seemingly been conditioned to keep their gamer credentials out of sight and their passions muted. Not so Rana Rahman. As soon as our call to the founder and
CEO of Raptor PR begins, there are no ambiguities about where his interests lay. The room from where he conducts his hybrid business is more like a streaming teenager’s bedroom than the sober workspace of a businessperson - a legacy of creating a gamified brand in the midst of lockdown which has become Rahman’s calling card. Carefully framed is Rahman himself, in his swept-back gaming chair, with an illuminated LEGO Batman logo to his right and a Back to the Future California licence plate mounted to his left. Out of shot, we like to imagine, there’s a selection of game character figurines and the same Sinclair ZX Spectrum his parents bought him for Christmas 1983.
46 | MCV/DEVELOP December 2022
GALAXIAN QUEST Rahman admits to being uncharacteristically unprepared for our interview. Normally he would advise clients to have a briefing document to hand, listing what to get across and what subjects should be avoided, but on this occasion the preparation is probably unnecessary. He has one story to tell, how a nerdy
game fan found a way to live the dream and work in games. Not the most original tale, being one all MCV readers can claim a part in, but one that is always worth telling and in this instance has more than a few twists along the way. “I fell in love with Galaxian in a cold arcade in Wales,” Rahman
begins, painting a picture of a childhood dominated by early arcade games, and whose burgeoning obsession was soon indulged by acquiring the aforementioned ZX Spectrum, swapping games in the school playground and typing in code listings from magazines. He was never going to be a coding genius, he soon realised, but having witnessed its beginnings as a cottage industry, Rahman was increasingly interested in where games were going, as an artform as
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