![]() 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 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. Brennan remembers having to rely on freelance writing to supplement his PR income. ![]() Without any investors Bastion experienced a slow start that was hand-to-mouth in some respects. We’d leave work on a Friday having ten clients then come in on Monday morning and four of them would have merged.” There were loads of independent publishers and hardware manufacturers. 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. 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. I’d be excited to play a game with story as the frontal aspect.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 think it would be a great thing to see Supergiant Games make a Zelda game. How great would to have a Zelda title that contained the poetic prose and heart-wrenching turns that peppered the entirety of Bastion? That’s something that would excite me much more than a prettier iteration on what Ocarina of Time delivered 14 years ago. Despite Zelda’s ever-growing mess of a timeline, the series has always given narrative a back-seat role. Bastion was obviously inspired by the timelessness of A Link to the Past (one needs only to look at The Kid’s varied arsenal that slowly grows as you progress through the game), but what made Supergiant’s downloadable title truly special was its marriage of addictive mechanics and an amazingly told story. While Nintendo is undoubtedly working on a big-budget Zelda title for the Wii U, I’d love to see them give Supergiant a chance at crafting a 2D installment of the beloved series. The phenomenal art direction, moody writing, and perfect narration combined to create one of those experiences that lingered long after you set down the controller. The freshman effort by Supergiant Games was an isometric action-RPG that contained a stronger atmosphere than just about anything released in the past few years. To some, it may seem like sacrilege to suggest that Nintendo outsource duties on The Legend of Zelda to another developer, but chances are that those naysayers haven’t played 2011’s Bastion.
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