Hello Ahmad, great to have you on board! Could you tell us a little about your career journey so far?

It’s great to be here! 😊 So I’ve been around the metaphorical marketing houses a little bit, working in various creative marketing agencies for a number of clients & industries since graduating from university in 2013.

I started in my hometown of Hull on an internship with an agency straight out of uni, working predominantly on marketing research projects. The agency really opened my eyes to the industry, and I loved how marketing could be so strategic yet creative! By experiencing real world projects first hand, I knew I had made the right decision to pursue a career in the creative industry.

After a couple of years in Hull, I moved to Leeds where I worked in retail marketing, creating and executing multi-channel marketing strategies for shopping and leisure destinations. This involved lots of travel, lots of long days, but most rewardingly, my very first promotion!

Since those days, I have worked as a Client/Project/Account Manager on exciting projects including retail POS, in-store activation, exhibitions and much more.

Finally, moving away from Leeds during lockdown in 2020 meant I was starting afresh, and Peek & Poke is the perfect place to begin the new chapter!

What is your job title at Peek & Poke and what does your role involve?

My role at Peek & Poke is Account Manager, and I am the point of contact for new and existing clients looking to chat about exciting game ideas and marketing campaigns involving gamification, along with running projects on a daily basis.

You’ll find me on calls or in meetings with clients, running between our Art and Dev teams, and overall keeping projects organised, alive and kicking from brief stage right through to launch!

But the most important part of my role is… game testing. I also have the fun job of being involved in QA, making sure the games are working as they should, checking all artwork and branding touch points meet requirements, and overall ensuring our games are ready to be delivered to our (hopefully happy) clients!

What are you looking forward to?

I’m a big lover of all types of games, so joining Peek & Poke has me very excited to get to know all of the game engines and try and get to the top of some leaderboards! The service and offering at Peek & Poke is something different to my previous experience, so I’m excited to work with the talented yet down-to-earth team, get stuck in on new and existing projects and deliver awesome games to be proud of.

This also means attending exhibitions and getting people to experience the games on our very own retro-inspired arcade cabs!

What keeps you busy outside of work?

I’m a pretty active guy, so I love going to the gym, playing football, occasionally snowboarding or going on adventures with my little Blue staffie, Indie (she keeps me very busy!).

In the same breath, I love my downtime so watching any and all Netflix series, a new anime series, gaming on the PS4 or reading a fictional fantasy book (probably intended for a teen audience) is where you will usually find me.

I also co-founded and launched my own fantasy drinking card game called Night Quest with friends in 2020, so thinking of new monster and magic cards, shouting about our creation on social and at expos, and (sometimes) playing the game with a few drinks is most likely what I’m doing.

What is your current / all-time favourite game? Digital or physical – there are no rules!

This is a very, very tough question, as I’ve played so many great games in my time.

Apart from Night Quest (obviously) I would have to list the following as there isn’t just one all-time favourite: Golden Axe, Spyro the Dragon, Super Mario 64, Star Wars Episode I: Racer, Hitman 2, LOTR: The Return of the King, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Need for Speed: Underground 2, Gears of War and most FIFA game since 2002.

Most recently, I really enjoyed playing Ghost of Tsushima.

Last but not least, and the one thing we all really want to know is, in the event of a zombie apocalypse, what’s the plan?

My zombie apocalypse plan is unconventional, but I reckon it’s fail-safe and future-proof.

Firstly, assuming every zombie is slow and limited to the ground (this isn’t 28 Days Later, come on) I would lead the remainder of the human race, or the 5-10 people I could actually persuade to join me… into the trees.

We would create a network of tree dwellings, and live within the eventual growing forests of the less-polluted future world. We’d build cafes in the conifers, offices embedded in the oaks and even supermarkets between the sycamores (awful alliteration fully intended!).

Hopefully, hundreds of years from now, the zombies will have eventually wandered aimlessly into the abyss of the oceans and our race can live on until the next Ice Age!