Impressions began as a chartered accountant’s sideline and ended as Sierra’s city-building studio. Its Caesar (1992) asked the player to build a Roman city that worked, with roads, water, housing and jobs, and then to defend it from barbarians. Under Sierra the same engine of needs and supply moved to Egypt, Greece and China. One of the programmers who wrote Caesar, Simon Bradbury, later made Stronghold, whose remakes were still selling in 2025.
An accountant’s sideline
Computer Gaming World told the founding story in 1993. David Lester had qualified as a chartered accountant and was working at Arthur Young, the accountancy firm, with fast-growing businesses. With Edward Grabowski, a systems analyst he had worked with since 1984, he knew a group of struggling developers who could not find a publisher. Publishers, the magazine wrote, did not want “much of anything that didn’t have a high-profile license”. Lester put up money to publish some games himself and paid Zeppelin Games to distribute them.
The company’s own ten-year timeline, printed in the German PC Player in 1998, dates this to 1988 and names the first title as a Kenny Dalglish football game. Zeppelin launched Kenny Dalglish Soccer Manager on its new full-price label, Cognito, early in 1989; ACE reviewed the Atari ST version that March at £19.95. CGW reported “a huge hit and a number one sales position during the summer of 1989”, but the arrangement with Zeppelin fell apart, and Impressions “emerged as a distinct brand name”. Its 1990 follow-up, Kenny Dalglish Soccer Match, came out under the Impressions label and did not impress CRASH.
Looking back in 1998, Lester was frank about those years. “When Impressions was founded it was more my personal hobby,” he told PC Player. “We worked with amateur programmers and did everything more for fun, to see whether we could get anything made.” There was heavy financial pressure, he said, to release programs before they were really finished.
Strategy and nothing else
Rorke’s Drift (1990) set the direction. It recreated the defence of a British outpost in the Zulu war, where, as ACE put it, 101 able-bodied men and 36 wounded held off 4,000 warriors, and it represented each man in the battle individually. Amiga Computing reported that each man would have his own strengths and weaknesses and eighty frames of animation, and wondered why Impressions had “taken a break from football games” to make it. ACE called it “the sort of game you either love or you hate”.
It sold, and in March 1991 Lester, then the managing director in London, announced that Impressions would “concentrate solely on strategy games”. “The move is a direct result of market forces,” he told Amiga Computing. “The response from consumers to our strategy games has been phenomenal, with far more praise and repeat sales than our arcade titles ever achieved.” Cohort: Fighting for Rome followed in 1991, and after it came more strategy games for the Amiga, ST and PC: Air Bucks, Cohort 2, Global Domination, D-Day: The Beginning of the End and Detroit. Amiga Power’s review headers priced them between £29.99 and £35.
Not all of them were well received. PC Player’s 1998 timeline described Cohort 2 (1993) as having gone down in history as one of the worst strategy games of all time, and Lester admitted that for a long time the company had made “the mistake of believing our products had to become ever more complicated”.
The move to America
The games found buyers in the United States, and American publishers offered licensing deals. Lester chose to move instead. According to CGW, Impressions set up its headquarters in Farmington, Connecticut, near the strategy publisher Omnitrend, whose games it also published; PC Player’s timeline dates the first American office to 1992. By 1994 the company’s address was Cambridge, Massachusetts. Lester told CGW that he wanted Americans not “to think of our products as European games”, and showed its editors an early version of Caesar. By the time the beta arrived, the magazine wrote, “every suggestion had been implemented”.
Caesar
Lester described Caesar as a bathtub idea. In 1998 he told PC Player it came from three games he had been playing: SimCity, Castles and the Amiga’s Defender of the Crown. Each had a weakness: SimCity ran out of new challenges once you had mastered the balance of a city. A Roman city that had to be walled and defended against barbarians added what was missing.
Amiga Power reviewed it in December 1992. “If you want Sim City with a few more barbarians, then Caesar’s definitely your game,” wrote Dave Golder. The player governed a province on two levels: a close-up city that needed housing, water, jobs, culture, education, a forum and roads, and a provincial map where armies had to be raised against raiders. He warned that it was harder to get into than SimCity and that mistakes were hard to undo, but called it “a pretty darned good and compelling game”. CGW nominated it as a strategy game of the year in 1993 and wrote that Caesar had “moved Impressions up in class from British importer to American software publisher”.
The credits show who made it. Amiga Power listed David Lester and Simon Bradbury as the authors of Caesar Deluxe in 1993, and Lester, Bradbury and Chris Denman for Global Domination the following year. In October 1994 Bradbury, by then programming the Amiga version of Lords of the Realm, walked Amiga Power through that game’s castle building and sieges, and the magazine noted that he had also written Caesar. Lords of the Realm, designed by Lester and Chris Foster, was one of the best received of Impressions’ games; AmigaWorld called it “easily the best game of its type on any platform”.
Inside Sierra
Sierra On-Line bought Impressions in 1995 for an undisclosed sum. Lester told CGW the sale was a sign of consolidation in the industry and gave his company “distribution clout”; development, the magazine reported, would stay autonomous. In 1998 Lester said Sierra had no direct influence on the games, but that its money let a project run longer, which mattered for quality. PC Player visited Impressions that year on Upper Richmond Road in London, where Caesar III was being made; two other projects were under way at its Boston office.
The Roman games became a series. Caesar II (1995) and Caesar III (1998) were followed by Pharaoh (1999), set in ancient Egypt. Its brand manager, Alex Rodberg, told PC Zone that the team had asked its fans where the next city game should be set, and Egypt was by far the most popular choice. The team’s bibliography ran to well over a hundred books, many of them borrowed from the Boston Public Library, and the annual flooding of the Nile forced a new food model: one harvest a year to feed the city, and farmers with nothing to do for months. Zeus: Master of Olympus (2000) moved to Greece, and Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom (2002) to China. Reviewing Emperor, CGW called it the “same old game system they’ve been honing since Caesar started it all 10 years ago”.
Impressions survived Sierra’s 1999 reorganisation, when CGW listed it among the studios kept on. Its last game was Lords of the Realm III, published by Vivendi Universal in 2004. By then key members of the team had left to found Tilted Mill Entertainment, whose first game, Children of the Nile, looked and played, in CGW’s words, “like the Impressions city-building games”. Impressions itself closed in 2004.
Firefly and Stronghold
Simon Bradbury and Eric Ouellette, who had met at Impressions working on the Caesar and Lords of the Realm games, founded Firefly Studios in 1999. Their first game, Stronghold (2001), was about building and defending a medieval castle, the part of Lords of the Realm that Bradbury had described to Amiga Power in 1994. It was a success, and Firefly made a series of it. By 2003 CGW was calling Bradbury Firefly’s director, and in 2004 he and Ouellette, as the designers of Stronghold 2, said their aim was “not to reinvent the wheel” but not to repeat the same game either. Devolver Digital bought Firefly in 2021. By Firefly’s account, Stronghold: Definitive Edition topped a global top-sellers chart on its release in 2023, and Stronghold Crusader: Definitive Edition sold a quarter of a million copies in its first three weeks in 2025.
Sources
- Computer Gaming World issue 103, February 1993, pp. 98–100, company report “No ‘Impressions’ of Lion Tamers”: Lester and Grabowski, Arthur Young, Zeppelin Games, the summer of 1989, Rorke’s Drift, the move to Farmington and Omnitrend, Lester’s quotations, the Caesar preview.
- PC Player (Germany), September 1998, pp. 46–47, Impressions interview with David Lester and Simon Bradbury, and its timeline “10 Jahre Impressions” (in German; quotations translated here).
- ACE issue 16, January 1989, p. 27: Zeppelin’s first full-price game on its Cognito label. ACE issue 18, March 1989: review of K Dalglish Soccer Manager (Cognito, Atari ST, £19.95). Your Sinclair issue 43, July 1989: the Spectrum release on Cognito.
- CRASH issue 79, August 1990: review of Kenny Dalglish Soccer Match (Impressions).
- Amiga Computing, June 1990, p. 35: “Getting the drift”. ACE issue 36, September 1990: review of Rorke’s Drift. Amiga Computing issue 34, March 1991: “Impressions plump for strategy”. ACE issue 45, June 1991: Cohort.
- Amiga Power issue 20, December 1992: review of Caesar (Dave Golder; £29.99). Issue 30, October 1993: Caesar Deluxe (David Lester and Simon Bradbury; £29.99). Issue 34, February 1994: Global Domination (David Lester, Simon Bradbury, Chris Denman; £34.99). Issue 40, August 1994: D-Day: The Beginning of the End (£34.99). Issue 42, October 1994: Detroit (£35) and the Lords of the Realm preview with Simon Bradbury.
- Computer Gaming World issue 111, October 1993: strategy game of the year nominations. Issue 124, November 1994: review of Lords of the Realm (Chris Foster and David Lester; Cambridge, Massachusetts).
- AmigaWorld vol. 11 no. 3, March 1995: Lords of the Realm.
- Computer Gaming World issue 133, August 1995, p. 25: Sierra buys Impressions. Issue 135, October 1995: Caesar II. Issue 171, October 1998: Caesar III. Issue 185, December 1999: Sierra’s reorganisation. Issue 199, February 2001: Zeus. Issue 220, November 2002, p. 126: Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom. Issue 240, July 2004: Lords of the Realm III and Tilted Mill’s Children of the Nile. Issue 247, January 2005: Children of the Nile.
- PC Zone issue 82, November 1999: review of Pharaoh. Issue 83, December 1999: interview with Alex Rodberg.
- 576 Kbyte (Hungary) issue 137, October 2002: Firefly’s founders and Stronghold. Computer Gaming World issue 230, September 2003 (Bradbury as Firefly director) and issue 244, November 2004 (Stronghold 2).
- Firefly Studios, “About us” (web, secondary): the founders, 1999, Stronghold in 2001, Devolver Digital, the Definitive Editions. https://fireflyworlds.com/about-us/
- Wikipedia, “Impressions Games” (web, secondary): Lords of the Realm III as the final game and the closure in 2004. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impressions_Games