Psygnosis | Code Like It's 198x

In 1989 Psygnosis worked from a small suite of rooms above a steelworks on the Liverpool dockside. From there it published some of the most expensive games in British shops, at £24.95 each, and wrapped them in paintings by Roger Dean, the artist behind Yes’s album covers. Six years later the same company, now owned by Sony, made the game that sold best when the PlayStation reached Europe. Psygnosis began in the collapse of one of the 1980s’ most famous failures, Imagine Software, and its studio carried on in Liverpool until 2012.

Fast facts

Founded: 1984, Liverpool, by Ian Hetherington, formerly a director of Imagine. Later histories also name Dave Lawson, Imagine’s co-founder. Jonathan Ellis joined soon after and ran the business side.
Company: Psygnosis Limited, Companies House 01039371, took the Psygnosis name on 3 July 1985.
Look: box art by Roger Dean, who also designed the owl logo.
Early games: Brataccas, Deep Space, Barbarian, Terrorpods, Obliterator, Menace, Blood Money, Shadow of the Beast.
Biggest hit: Lemmings (1991), developed by DMA Design.
Owner from 1993: Sony.
PlayStation games: WipEout and Destruction Derby (1995), Formula 1 (1996), Colony Wars and G-Police (1997).
Later name: SCE Studio Liverpool, from about 2000. Closed in August 2012.

Out of Imagine

Imagine collapsed in July 1984. Before the end, Dave Lawson and Ian Hetherington had set up a new company to take on Imagine’s two unfinished “megagames”, Bandersnatch and Psyclapse, and some of its staff. At the PCW Show in September 1985 CRASH spotted an Atari ST game on the stand of a new company called Psygnosis that “looked remarkably familiar to glimpsed screens of the (in)famous Bandersnatch”. Imagine’s former programmer Eugene Evans was demonstrating it. It became Brataccas, Psygnosis’s first game. The Imagine Software entry tells the story of the megagames.

The limited company that took the Psygnosis name was not new. It was a 1972 Birkenhead company, Robert Smith & Sons (Engineers Birkenhead) Limited, renamed Psygnosis Limited on 3 July 1985.

ACE profiled the company in September 1989, and named Ian Hetherington as its founder. Jonathan Ellis, a “bizz whizz”, joined soon after the company was formed. The two sides were kept apart: Hetherington ran the programming and Ellis the business, and Ellis said he never had time to play the games. By 1991 the American magazine Info described Psygnosis as jointly owned by the two men.

Only 16-bit

ACE described Psygnosis as the first company in Britain to concentrate only on 16-bit games. Brataccas, the magazine said, came out on the Atari ST before the machine reached Britain, and “caused a sensation in both the US and Britain”.

Hetherington explained why the company then chose the Amiga. At first, he said, “you could release simultaneously on the ST and the Amiga. The products were virtually identical”, because games were being “written down” to stay compatible with the ST. “We took a look at the Amiga, liked what we saw, and decided to give it special attention.” ACE’s profile placed Barbarian, released on both machines together, in the summer of 1986, but the game belongs to 1987: Psygnosis showed “a demo of Barbarian, the latest” at the Atari show in April 1987, Computer Gamer reported, and in September the American Amiga World described it as a new game. (Palace Software’s Barbarian, a different game, came out in 1987 as well.)

The games were not cheap. A June 1988 advertisement in ACE offered Obliterator, Terrorpods, Barbarian, Deep Space and Arena at £24.95 each. The same year Psygnosis started a second label with the name of Imagine’s other megagame, Psyclapse. Among its games was Menace, a shoot-’em-up by DMA Design, a young team from Dundee. In May 1989 ACE reported that DMA, “flushed with the success of Menace on the Psyclapse label”, was finishing its follow-up, Blood Money.

Psygnosis spent little on itself. “We reckon we pay less for this space than most people in the south pay for their car parking,” the company told ACE after moving from the steelworks to a new building overlooking the port. “As soon as you start spending tons of money on building a flashy image, you stop spending it on programming,” Ellis said.

Roger Dean and the owl

Roger Dean had already designed boxes for Imagine’s megagames. For Psygnosis he designed the company’s logo, the owl, and painted covers for many of its games. Dean told Time Extension in 2025 that he met Jonathan Ellis, who knew his work, and that Psygnosis “were very clear about what they wanted, but they didn’t know visually or even how to put the words together”. According to Dean, the name as well as the owl came largely from him. He often painted a cover before seeing the game, and the developers of Barbarian put the dragon from his painting into the game.

Other artists painted Psygnosis boxes too. A Danish magazine named Melvyn Grant alongside Dean in 1989.

Shadow of the Beast

Shadow of the Beast (1989) was written by Reflections, the team of Martin Edmondson, and published by Psygnosis. Hetherington called it “a 100% Amiga programming effort”. It came on two disks, each holding 1040K through custom loading routines, with every file compressed by about 37%. It sold for £34.99 in a box twice the normal size, with a Roger Dean cover and a free T-shirt with more of his artwork. David Whittaker wrote the music.

Its fame came from its scrolling. CU Amiga’s reviewer counted “no less than 13 layers of parallax, in both the ground and the sky”. Reflections got them by combining the Amiga’s two playfields with the Copper, which changed scroll positions and colours part-way down the screen. The parallax scrolling entry explains how.

Lemmings

Lemmings, published in 1991, came from DMA Design in Dundee, the team behind Menace and Blood Money. It made Psygnosis a large publisher. That summer Italian magazines reported Jonathan Ellis collecting a trophy for Psygnosis as the best software house of 1991. Edge later called Psygnosis “for years … almost a one-product stable”, that product being Lemmings, and pointed out the irony that its flagship game was designed by “Scottish third-party developers DMA”.

Sony

In the early 1990s Psygnosis moved into CD-ROM. Edge’s first issue, in October 1993, covered Microcosm, its first CD game, with graphics rendered on Silicon Graphics workstations and music recorded by Rick Wakeman in a studio.

By then Sony owned it. Edge reported that Sony bought Psygnosis in June 1993, “as part of the initial groundwork for PlayStation’s arrival”, and put the price at £30 million. Not everyone approved. In February 1995 the magazine wrote that many had questioned the purchase: “Why was a company with so few quality games to its name placed in such high esteem by Sony?” Hetherington and Ellis became joint managing directors of Sony Electronic Publishing in Europe.

Psygnosis also helped build the PlayStation’s development tools. PC Gamer reported in 1996 that PlayStation games were written on PCs fitted with plug-in development cards costing about £2,000, most of them unofficial cards supplied by Psygnosis’s hardware division, Psy-Q.

WipEout

The PlayStation went on sale in Britain on Friday 29 September 1995. Edge reported that WipEout was the strongest-selling game on the machine, outselling Namco’s Ridge Racer. The Liverpool branch of Game held a WipEout promotion on launch day.

WipEout was an anti-gravity racer, designed by Nick Burcombe, who said the idea owed a lot to an old Amiga game, Powerdrome, “down the pub”. The Designers Republic designed its look, inside the game as well as on the box. Its soundtrack mixed in-house music with tracks by Leftfield, Orbital and the Chemical Brothers; Orbital recorded a new track specially. “I’ve always been into dance music,” Burcombe told Edge, “and a dance music soundtrack is the only thing that would have suited an ultra-fast game with attitude.”

By April 1996 WipEout had sold 60,000 copies in Britain, which Edge reckoned was more than half of all PlayStation owners there, and over 250,000 across Europe. Psygnosis told the magazine it was the company’s most successful game made in-house: Lemmings and Reflections’ Destruction Derby had sold as well or better, “but they were both published on behalf of someone else”.

Other developers kept supplying Psygnosis’s PlayStation catalogue. Bizarre Creations wrote Formula 1 (1996), and in-house teams made Colony Wars and G-Police (1997). Late in 1995 the company briefly traded as SIS, Sony Interactive Studios, before the Psygnosis name came back. In 1999 Reflections split away and was bought by GT Interactive, while Sony kept the Destruction Derby name.

Studio Liverpool

The Psygnosis name disappeared around 2000. By May 2000 Edge was crediting the Liverpool team’s games to “SCEE (Studio Liverpool)”. In a 2002 feature, Edge quoted former staff, who did not want to be named, on the company’s decline under Sony. One said that Psygnosis’s biggest successes had always come from outside developers such as Reflections, Bizarre Creations and Traveller’s Tales. Another said: “One Friday it was Psygnosis, on Monday it was Sony Corporate.”

Studio Liverpool went on making WipEout games, among them WipEout Pure for the PSP in 2005 and WipEout 2048 for the PlayStation Vita in 2012, and Formula One games for the PlayStation 2. On 22 August 2012 Michael Denny of Sony Worldwide Studios Europe told the staff that the studio would close. Former staff founded new Liverpool studios, among them Firesprite, which Sony bought in 2021.

Sources

Companies House, company 01039371, Psygnosis Limited: incorporation in 1972 and the change of name on 3 July 1985.
CRASH issue 21, October 1985: the PCW Show and the Psygnosis stand.
ACE issue 9, June 1988: Psygnosis advertisement (£24.95 prices).
ACE issue 13, October 1988: “Psyclapse — a new label from Psygnosis” advertisement (Freepost, Liverpool L3 3AB).
ACE issue 20, May 1989: DMA Design, Menace and Blood Money.
ACE issue 24, September 1989, p. 20: profile of Psygnosis (Hetherington; Ellis; Brataccas; Barbarian; the ST and the Amiga; Beast; the offices).
K (Italy) issue 11, November 1989: Shadow of the Beast’s box, Roger Dean artwork and T-shirt.
Amiga Interface (Denmark) no. 3, 1989: Roger Dean and Melvyn Grant.
Amiga World, September 1987: Psygnosis showing Barbarian. Commodore Computing International, June 1987: Palace Software’s Barbarian.
Computer Gamer issue 27, June 1987: Psygnosis showing “a demo of Barbarian, the latest” at the Atari Computer Show, 24–26 April 1987.
CU Amiga, October 1989, p. 59: Shadow of the Beast review (“no less than 13 layers of parallax”).
ZZAP! issue 64, August 1990: Shadow of the Beast music credited to David Whittaker.
Stuart Hunt, “Beauty of the Beasts”, interview with Martin Edmondson, in The Amiga Book (Imagine Publishing, from Retro Gamer), pp. 66–69.
Info issue 36, February 1991: Psygnosis “jointly owned by Jonathan Ellis and Ian Hetherington”.
Computer + Videogiochi (Italy), July 1991, and Amiga Magazine (Italy), June 1991: Jonathan Ellis receives the award for best software house of 1991.
Edge issue 1, October 1993: “Making Microcosm” (Psygnosis since 1984; Rick Wakeman).
Edge issue 17, February 1995: Sony’s purchase of Psygnosis for £30 million, and the doubts about it. Issue 18, March 1995: Ellis and Hetherington as joint managing directors of Sony Electronic Publishing (Europe).
Official UK PlayStation Magazine issue 1, November 1995: “SIS (formerly known as Psygnosis)”.
Edge issue 27, December 1995: the UK PlayStation launch and WipEout’s sales.
PC Gamer (UK) issue 28, March 1996: PlayStation development cards and Psy-Q.
Edge issue 31, April 1996: WipEout feature (Sony’s purchase in June 1993; Nick Burcombe; the Designers Republic; the soundtrack; sales). The same issue: Formula 1 by Bizarre Creations.
Edge issue 46, June 1997: Colony Wars as an in-house title.
Official UK PlayStation Magazine issue 48, August 1999: Reflections’ split from Psygnosis.
Edge issue 84, May 2000: games credited to “SCEE (Studio Liverpool)”.
Edge issue 118, Christmas 2002: the decline of Psygnosis, from former staff.
Edge issue 148, April 2005: WipEout Pure.
“They Were Very Clear About What They Wanted”, Time Extension, October 2025: Roger Dean on the owl logo and the box art (web, secondary).
“Studio Liverpool (1984-2012) - A Eulogy”, GodisaGeek.com, August 2012: the closure (web, secondary).
“Psygnosis”, Wikipedia: Dave Lawson as a co-founder; WipEout 2048; Firesprite (web, secondary).