Imagine Software | Code Like It's 198x

Not to be confused with Imagine, the Amiga 3D modelling and animation package, which has no connection to this company.

Imagine Software was a Liverpool games publisher that lasted a little over eighteen months. It began in 1982 in a front room, with one hit Spectrum game. By early 1984 it had a staff of more than a hundred, a renovated office block near the site of the Cavern Club, a garage of sports cars and an advertising campaign for two games it called the most original ever conceived. In July 1984 it was wound up for unpaid debts, with a BBC documentary crew still filming.

The story has been told many times since, and it has grown in the telling. The fullest account from the time is CRASH’s, written with the help of the programme’s director and published in December 1984. Later versions add details it does not contain.

From Bug-Byte to a front room

Mark Butler and Dave Lawson both worked at Bug-Byte, Liverpool’s first software house: Butler as sales manager, Lawson as a programmer. Big K reported in 1984 that Lawson left Bug-Byte in July 1982 and Butler two months later. According to CRASH, they left “after several disagreements with the Bug-Byte management” and set up Imagine “in a small front room”. Eugene Evans, a young Bug-Byte programmer, soon joined them.

Lawson wrote Arcadia, a shoot-’em-up for the Spectrum and VIC-20, and Butler “sold it into shops starved of software over the 82 Christmas”. Imagine was advertising it in the January 1983 issue of Computer and Video Games, with a promise that any Imagine tape that failed to load first time would be replaced at once. The money from Arcadia went into bigger premises, more staff and more games. Among the 1983 releases were Schizoids, Zzoom, Ah Diddums, Molar Maul and Jumping Jack.

Paul Finnegan, who ran sales in the early months, later described the atmosphere: “the amount of money coming in was fantastic… but it was going out the other door. Everybody had a nice car, even the cleaners had a Porsche!” He fell out with the operations director, Bruce Everiss, and left after six or seven months to help Jon Woods and David Ward sell the games of the company that became Ocean.

The Glass Tower

When CRASH visited in early 1984, Imagine had moved into a renovated four-storey red-brick building in Sir Thomas Street, “known colloquially as the ‘Glass Tower’”, a short walk from where the Cavern Club had stood. The magazine found the parallel irresistible and compared the company to the Beatles. It reported, from what it was told, that Imagine had over 100 employees, a head office, two warehouses and a separate building for contract programming, and that the founders were “worth an estimated £30 million”.

Imagine’s own advertisements matched that tone. One described Imagine as “the largest most successful software house in the world”, working from “our massive programming, graphic arts and music department in the heart of Liverpool”.

Some of the image was hollow. The national press reported that Eugene Evans, still a teenager, was earning £35,000 a year and could afford an expensive car he was too young to drive. The BBC’s director later found that Evans “had obviously never received anything like the £35,000 a year quoted in the PR story”.

Psyclapse and Bandersnatch

Early in 1984 Imagine began a series of advertisements for two games, Bandersnatch for the 48K Spectrum and Psyclapse for the Commodore 64. The first showed four programmers, Ian Weatherburn, Mike Glover, John Gibson and Eugene Evans, who had been “brought together to pool their awesome talents to create the two most sensational, mind boggling games ever imagined”. The next, a “progress report”, said their faces were “now drawn and haggard, their eyes are bloodshot”, and kept a tally of what they had consumed: 1,008 cups of coffee, 897 cans of soft drink and hundreds of sandwiches. A third introduced three artists and two musicians who had joined the “A Team”. None of the advertisements said what kind of games these were: “Rumours abound they’re adventure games, they’re arcade games, they’re completely original concepts.”

CRASH had been told in March 1984 that Bandersnatch “should be ready sometime around May”. It never was. According to CRASH’s later account, the games needed a hardware add-on “which was to be made in the East”, in huge quantities to get the price right, and Imagine no longer had the money to order it. The artist Roger Dean had already designed the boxes and the advertisements, and the managers were filmed discussing whether a box big enough to justify £30 to £40 would put buyers off. When filming began, John Gibson and Ian Weatherburn were working hard on Bandersnatch, but Psyclapse was “nothing more than a paper idea”.

Later retellings tend to present the hardware add-on as part of the megagames’ public pitch. The advertisements quoted here do not mention one.

How the money ran out

CRASH’s account, drawn from what the BBC crew saw and from interviews with the people involved, points to several causes.

The Marshall Cavendish deal. Late in 1983 Imagine agreed to produce games for the publisher Marshall Cavendish, a deal “which may have been worth as much as £11 million”. The contracts were signed early in 1984. Marshall Cavendish grew unhappy with the lack of progress and the quality of what it saw, pulled out and asked for its money back. Imagine had already taken on more staff to do the work, and laid none of them off.
The duplicating gamble. For Christmas 1983 Imagine booked the entire capacity of Kiltdale, one of the biggest tape duplicators, to stop rival companies getting their games made in time. After Christmas the market fell, Imagine was left renting a warehouse for hundreds of thousands of unsold cassettes, and it cut its prices below what shops had paid for the stock already on their shelves.
The advertising. Imagine’s advertisements were designed by Stephen Blower of Studio Sting, a company set up with Butler and Lawson to handle Imagine’s design and advertising. After a dispute over Blower’s 10% share of Imagine, Studio Sting was left with unpaid magazine advertising bills. A court ordered Butler and Lawson to pay Blower £89,000.
No financial control. Bruce Everiss told CRASH that when he looked at the records, the company had never made a VAT return, never reconciled its bank account and had no budgets, cash-flow forecasts or invoice authorisation: “Just no financial control at all.” Financial control and a directorship had been given to Ian Hetherington.

The end, on camera

The BBC’s Commercial Breaks series followed people trying to break a new product into the market. Its director chose Imagine early in 1984, drawn by the advertising and the Eugene Evans stories, and the megagames gave the programme its subject. Lawson saw a chance to have the creation of the megagames recorded for posterity. CRASH reported that the crew “got a rather different story to the one they had conceived”.

A petition against the company was presented to the High Court as early as 16 April 1984. A winding-up petition was heard on 11 June. That month the crew filmed Butler at the Isle of Man TT motorcycle races with the Imagine racing team. On Monday 9 July a petition brought by VNU Business Press, publisher of Personal Computer Games among other magazines, went unopposed. The History of Ocean Software says VNU was owed £10,000 for advertising.

By then Lawson and Hetherington had set up a new company, Finchspeed, to take on the megagames and about 20 of the staff. Everiss said Butler was told only at the last minute. Lawson and Hetherington were in America raising money as the end came. Hetherington told CRASH he had been “fund-raising, and we were damn near successful”. The crew filmed the last days. Everiss described staff hiding from the camera and “a big pile of empty fire extinguishers because there’s been fire extinguisher fights all week”. Butler, injured in a crash at the races, returned to find the bailiffs had arrived. Among the things they took was his Ferrari Boxer. Everiss was left to find jobs for about 60 staff, and resigned.

The programme went out on BBC2 on 13 December 1984 at 8pm.

Afterwards

Bandersnatch went to Fireiron, a company founded by Lawson and Hetherington, and for a time Sinclair Research held an option to publish it for the QL. At the PCW Show in September 1985 CRASH noticed an Atari ST game on the stand of a new company, Psygnosis, that “looked remarkably familiar to glimpsed screens of the (in)famous Bandersnatch”, with Eugene Evans demonstrating it. ACE later described Psygnosis as “set up out of the ashes of Imagine Software” and named Hetherington as a co-founder. Its first game was Brataccas.
Denton Designs. Five former Imagine staff, John Gibson among them, founded Denton Designs in Liverpool, with some backing from Ocean. Its first game, Gift from the Gods, came out through Ocean.
The name. Ocean bought the Imagine label from the liquidators, “not the company, its assets and liabilities, only the name”, in David Ward’s words. From 1985 it used the name for arcade conversions from Konami and other Japanese companies, such as Hypersports.

In CRASH’s own reviews, the games the original company released on the Spectrum scored between 54% (Cosmic Cruiser) and 85% (Alchemist). Several games Ocean published under the Imagine name scored higher: the Konami conversion Mikie and the original Movie both reached 93%.

Sources

CRASH, issue 12 (Christmas Special, December 1984), pp. 60-63: Roger Kean, “The Biggest Commercial Break of Them All”, written with the programme’s director. The main source for the founding, the BBC’s approach and intentions, the Evans salary story, the 103 staff, the racing team, the megagames and their add-on, Roger Dean, the Marshall Cavendish deal, Kiltdale, Studio Sting and the £89,000, Everiss on the finances, Finchspeed, the petitions of 16 April, 11 June and 9 July, the last days, the bailiffs and the broadcast date.
CRASH, issue 2 (March 1984), “Imagine-ation”: the Glass Tower, the staff and the valuation; Bandersnatch due “around May”. Issue 3 (April 1984), news: the four programmers, Bandersnatch for the Spectrum and Psyclapse for the Commodore 64.
Sinclair User, issue 23 (February 1984), issue 24 (March 1984) and issue 25 (April 1984): Imagine’s megagame advertisements. CRASH, issue 3 (April 1984): the advertisement “the largest most successful software house in the world”.
Big K, issue 4 (July 1984): Lawson’s and Butler’s departures from Bug-Byte.
Computer and Video Games, issue 15 (January 1983): Arcadia advertisement. Issue 35 (September 1984): “The End of the Road”, Imagine gone bust.
Chris Wilkins and Roger M. Kean, The History of Ocean Software (Revival Retro Events, 2013), pp. 12-14 (Paul Finnegan’s account) and pp. 43-44 (the winding-up, VNU’s £10,000, Ocean’s purchase of the name).
CRASH, issue 17 (June 1985): Denton Designs; Bandersnatch and Evans to Fireiron. Issue 21 (October 1985): the PCW Show and the Psygnosis stand.
ACE, issue 29 (February 1990), p. 93: Psygnosis “set up out of the ashes of Imagine Software”; first title Brataccas. Issue 24 (September 1989) and issue 45 (June 1991): Hetherington as Psygnosis’s founder and co-founder.
CRASH, issue 48 (January 1988): review index (scores for Imagine-label games before and after the collapse).
Edge, issue 118 (Christmas 2002): a later retelling, including the megagames’ “hardware add-ons to support hitherto impossible technical feats”.