The big PR beasts of the early 1990s were the in-house teams – Sega, Nintendo, and on PC, Virgin Interactive. ![]() As for the games, they were far from becoming the aspirational playthings Sony would help make mainstream. ![]() Mobile phones had no utility beyond making expensive calls, and the internet, such as it was, was equally unevolved. Magazines were the only influencers of the day, and, of course, there were far less of them than the content channels we endure now. Nothing was data driven, with focus groups, favour and gut instinct powering most videogame decision making. In 1992 games PR was as different to today as the tech and media landscape it served. 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. It was there that Barrett was invited to join Ocean, “So I went up to Manchester and spent two years there. “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. ![]() 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. “I got to know Steve Franklin (Commodore UK’s MD) very closely and he invited me to become marketing manager. 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.
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