From left to right, Becky Mullen, Ben Skipper and Sam Jones
Ben Skipper, but the point is that he’s the exception rather than the rule. “I was a little bit nervous about it,” he says about
coming to the end of ten years studying and working in journalism. “It was kind of ‘I don’t really want to do the journalism thing anymore. What should I do? PR, that’s what everyone else does, right? That makes sense. Give that a go!’ But it’s ended up being more of a natural fit for me than journalism. Much more satisfying and fun, and much less stressful.” Skipper’s damascene transformation from journo to
PR was eased considerably by assurances from friends and colleagues, as well as quiet encouragement from Ravi Vijh, Bastion’s client services director, who has been the hidden hand behind many of Bastion’s key appointments in recent years. “My chat with Ravi that turned out to be a job
interview was actually through Twitter.” Says Jones, who first joined Bastion in 2017 in a large part due to his interest and passion for esports. “I was following Ravi on Twitter and I put a post out saying I’m looking for work and he was like ‘Yeah, we should have a talk.’” Jones was soon introduced to Bastion co-founder Dean Barrett and a first job in the games industry was quickly
“Before I joined I wasn’t expecting a company where I liked everyone and have a boss who I respect and
is good fun.” Ben Skipper, senior account manager
52 | MCV/DEVELOP October/November 2022
secured. “I’ve never seen a hiring process quite like it. They saw my enthusiasm for esports and passion for games and saw that potential. PR was front of mind for me at the time and I wanted to nurture that as well.” Starting on the very same day was Mullen, who joined
the agency as something of a veteran. “I’ve always done PR,” she says. “Straight out of uni I went to Weber Shandwick, doing tech PR for B2B clients, but then decided I wanted to focus on games.” Inevitably Bastion came up foremost in her searches and she reached out to see if there were any suitable roles. “You learn more about the company as you start
speaking to Ravi and Dean,” says Jones. “You get the line that they helped launch the original PlayStation - it would always pop up in every interview - and you’d go ‘Okay, I want to work there.’”
TESTING TIMES It’s easy to talk about how much PR and the games industry is in many ways unrecognisable from the days when Bastion started out in 1992, but when it comes to the most notable industry changes since she joined Bastion, Mullen doesn’t hesitate to say what the biggest of them has been: “Covid, obviously. It has made quite a big shift in the past couple of years in terms of how we just do a lot of our work.” We may be seeing the return of large scale in-person events, such as gamescom, but she’s not convinced that things will get back to the way they were. Whatever the virus intends to do in the months and years ahead, streamed online events look likely to be with us for a while yet. “It will be interesting.” she adds cautiously. “I think that the legacy of Covid is flexibility in terms
of what we can offer to press and to consumers,” says Skipper. Yes, Bastion is finding that clients are wanting
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