Odin Computer Graphics
Named for gods nobody kept believing in
A Liverpool house that took 94% and 93% with Robin of the Wood and Nodes of Yesod, ran a second label called Thor, and closed — leaving a programmer who had already watched Imagine collapse to note that three of his employers had now gone under.
Odin Computer Graphics were a Liverpool house — the city that produced Bug-Byte, Imagine and Software Projects — publishing arcade adventures with a distinctive drawn look, under a Norse house identity that extended to a second label called Thor.
Commodore Format, in a 1992 A–Z of the departed, wrote the epitaph and could not resist the obvious joke:
ODIN — or Thor, as they were sometimes known. From their Valhalla came the ace arcade adventures… But everyone who worshipped the Norse gods after whom the company was named stopped believing in them.
Fast facts
- Based: Liverpool.
- Second label: Thor.
- Press evidence in this library: CRASH, Amstrad Action and Amiga Interface, 1985 to 1989.
- Named in the press as: Marc Dawson, programmer.
Confirmed CRASH scores, from the issue 48 index:
| Game | Score | Issue |
|---|---|---|
| Robin of the Wood | 94% | 24 |
| Nodes of Yesod | 93% | 19 |
Also published: Hypa-ball.
Marc Dawson, and three closures
The most useful account of Odin in this library is not British. It is a 1989 interview in the Danish magazine Amiga Interface, given by Marc Dawson — and its value is that it catches one programmer’s whole career shape in a paragraph.
Dawson started at Imagine at eighteen. After Imagine collapsed he made games for what the magazine calls “the now closed software houses, Odin and Thor”. His own favourites among his work were Hypa-ball on the C64, published by Odin, and Nodes of Yesod and Robin of the Wood — the two that took 93% and 94%.
By 1989 he had set up his own development house with another programmer, Steve Weatherill, and the magazine notes drily that three of his employers had now gone under — while making clear this was not held to be Dawson’s doing.
He also offered the most unglamorous description of games programming in this Vault, as a warning to readers thinking of trying it:
The problem with programming is that the majority of game development consists of boring programming. You start with the interesting part, where you work out all your ideas, but the ending is very, very tedious.
That is worth keeping precisely because it is the opposite of how the period is usually narrated. The bedroom-coder story is one of inspiration; the man who wrote a 94% game says the inspiration is the short part.
Why it mattered
Odin’s two big games score as highly as anything in this Vault’s working set, and almost nobody outside Spectrum owners of a certain age can name the company. That gap is the entry.
It also sits in a specific place geographically. Liverpool produced Bug-Byte, Imagine, Software Projects and Odin inside five years, and every one of them was gone or diminished by the end of the decade. The city’s software industry was not short of talent or of hits; what it lacked was any company that survived its own success. Odin is the least dramatic instance — no famous bankruptcy, no court case, no documentary — just a well-reviewed publisher that stopped.