The Liverpool games scene | Code Like It's 198x

In the summer of 1984 Big K sent Tony Tyler home to Liverpool to write about what he called “Scousesoft”: a city whose Merseybeat sixties, he wrote, had given way to “the sound of machine code”. He found three companies worth the trip. Bug-Byte had been started four years earlier by two chemistry students. Imagine Software had more than a hundred staff and offices a short walk from where the Cavern Club had stood. Software Projects had Jet Set Willy. A few months earlier Imagine’s programmer Eugene Evans had told the same magazine what the city’s games business felt like: “an ongoing soap opera. Everybody moving from one company to the next as easily as pop stars move record labels.”

That description held for thirty years. Liverpool’s companies kept failing, merging and being sold, and the same people kept turning up in the next one. Imagine went into liquidation within weeks of Tyler’s report, and its staff founded or joined half a dozen companies. One of them, Psygnosis, was bought by Sony and made WipEout, the best-selling game at the PlayStation’s British launch. When Sony closed its Liverpool studio in 2012, former staff set up new studios in the city, and in 2021 Sony bought one of those too.

Fast facts

Where: Liverpool and Merseyside, with neighbours in Runcorn and, at the other end of the M62, Manchester.
First games company: Bug-Byte, started by Tony Baden and Tony Milner and selling tapes by mail order from May 1980.
Best-known collapse: Imagine Software, wound up on 9 July 1984 with a BBC documentary crew still filming.
Longest-lived studio: Psygnosis, founded 1984, owned by Sony from 1993, renamed Studio Liverpool around 2000 and closed in August 2012.
Later studios: Bizarre Creations (1988 to 2011), Evolution Studios in Runcorn (1999 to 2016), Rage Software (early 1990s to 2003), Firesprite (from 2012).

A shop called Microdigital

Before anyone in Liverpool sold games, someone sold computers. Microdigital was one of the first computer shops in Britain. Bruce Everiss, later Imagine’s operations director, wrote in Your Computer in November 1984 that it “traded successfully in 1978”, that its customers “set up some of the earliest and most enthusiastic computer clubs in the country”, and that its staff “often left to set up or work for new microcomputer firms, spawning an industry”. The shop was later absorbed into the Laskys chain.

CRASH traced the same roots in its account of Imagine’s fall. Mark Butler, one of Imagine’s founders, and Eugene Evans had both worked at Microdigital. Everiss “was also associated with Microdigital, and so were many of the programmers who were later to become the bedrock of the Liverpool software business. They all knew each other pretty well.” Evans had started there as the tea-boy, and Big K called the shop what “the Cavern was to the Merseybeat and the Beatles”. “I learned to use every machine going,” he said. “I just sat down and used them all.”

Everiss also had an answer for readers who thought Liverpool an odd place for a computer industry. “The popular misconception of Merseyside,” he wrote, “is of a riotous Toxteth backing onto strike-bound docks.” He pointed instead to the electronics firms Plessey and Marconi, to large data-processing offices such as the National Giro, Royal Insurance and Littlewoods, and to the computer departments of Liverpool University and Liverpool Polytechnic.

Bug-Byte and the two walkouts

Tony Baden and Tony Milner were reading chemistry at Liverpool University when they started Bug-Byte. At first they had no duplicating equipment, so every mail-order tape was saved one at a time from a computer. The company’s first advertised address was in Coventry; by October 1981 it was in Old Hall Street, Liverpool. It sold Acorn Atom and ZX81 programs before the Spectrum, and in 1983 it published Matthew Smith’s Manic Miner.

Two groups left it, and both founded companies. In 1982 Dave Lawson, a programmer, and Mark Butler, the sales manager, left to set up Imagine in a front room, and Eugene Evans soon joined them. At the turn of 1984 Smith left with Alan and Soo Maton to found Software Projects, taking the rights to Manic Miner with him. Bug-Byte itself went into receivership in June 1985. CRASH’s news pages said the end severed “any final link with the original flowering of Liverpool programming talent that began with Bug-Byte and flowed into Imagine, Software Projects and many of the programming houses that now exist”. The Bug-Byte and Software Projects entries tell those stories in full.

Imagine, as the press reported it

Imagine’s rise and fall took about eighteen months, and the Imagine Software entry follows it closely. At its height it worked from a renovated office block in Sir Thomas Street. Its advertisements in Sinclair User in March 1984 gave the address, “5 Sir Thomas Street, Liverpool”, and a dealer line run by Colin Stokes with “20 lines”. The same spring its advertisements in Sinclair User and CRASH promised “COMING SOON FROM IMAGINE, PSYCLAPSE & BANDERSNATCH”, two “megagames” that never came out, and kept a tally of the coffee, soft drinks and sandwiches the programmers were getting through.

Your Spectrum reported the end in September 1984 under the headline “THE MEGA-GAME’S UP!”:

Following months of speculation, Liverpool-based software house, Imagine, has finally bitten the dust. Rumoured to have been struggling for quite some time and now having run out of money and excuses, the company has finally been placed into the hands of the official receiver.

The magazine named “poor sales and a failed contract with publisher Marshall Cavendish” as two major causes. Imagine had been paid a reported £200,000 in advance to write games for a Marshall Cavendish partwork on writing your own games, and reputedly spent the same again on equipment; when the publisher rejected the games, Imagine was left £400,000 out of pocket. CRASH’s longer account in December 1984 also put the Marshall Cavendish deal among the causes, alongside the megagames and the lack of financial control.

Everiss, who resigned a week before the liquidation, gave his own view in Your Computer. “The economics of games software is like high-stakes gambling,” he wrote: launching a game cost £10,000 or more, and a hit was “a licence to print money”. He listed the Marshall Cavendish contract and the megagames among the company’s mistakes, and ended with the people. “There are former staff working for Ocean, Bug-Byte and Software Projects using knowledge and skills gained while at Imagine,” he wrote, and “at least five new companies on Merseyside composed of these people.”

Where Imagine’s people went

The five companies are easy to follow in the magazines.

Fireiron and Psygnosis. Lawson and Ian Hetherington, Imagine’s financial director, set up Fireiron to carry on with Bandersnatch, and Eugene Evans went with them. At the PCW Show in September 1985 CRASH saw a game on the stand of a new company, Psygnosis, that looked “remarkably familiar” to screens of Bandersnatch, with Evans demonstrating it.
Denton Designs. Five of the megagame team, John Gibson, Karen Davies, Steve Cain, Graham Everitt and Ally Noble, formed a limited company in September 1984 and bought the development systems Imagine had used. CRASH found them in Rodney Street, Liverpool’s medical quarter, where suppliers sometimes addressed them as “Denture Designs”. They worked as a development house for other publishers, Ocean among them.
Odin. In September 1985 CRASH visited Odin Computer Graphics “in an office block in the middle of a windswept plaza in Liverpool’s dockland, just across the way from the deserted and sorry-looking offices of Bug Byte”. Paul McKenna ran it, Mark Butler had until recently been one of its directors, and its programmers came “some from Software Projects, some from Imagine”. Its Nodes of Yesod had been a CRASH Smash the month before. Odin had stopped trading by 1988.

Gibson’s own career shows how long the thread ran. After Imagine and Denton he worked at Psygnosis as its software manager in the early 1990s, and by 2012 he was at Evolution Studios.

Ocean, at the other end of the M62

Ocean Software was a Manchester company, founded by David Ward and Jon Woods in 1982, but it drew heavily on Liverpool. Paul Finnegan, who had sold games for Imagine in its early months, got Ocean’s games into the shops. Colin Stokes, the dealer contact in Imagine’s advertisements, was working for Ocean by 1986. Hunchback, which Sinclair User called Ocean’s best-selling game in 1984, was written by Christian Urquhart, a teenager who commuted from Wallasey. When Imagine collapsed, Ocean bought its name from the liquidators and used it as a label. Denton Designs wrote The Great Escape and Frankie Goes to Hollywood for Ocean.

In September 1987 Finnegan left Ocean to found Special FX in Liverpool’s Albert Dock, taking the programmer Jonathan “Joffa” Smith with him; it developed Batman: The Caped Crusader for Ocean. Finnegan went on to found Rage Software in Liverpool in the early 1990s. By 1998 Edge described Rage as “Liverpool-based”, with further offices in Birmingham, Newcastle and London. It collapsed in January 2003.

Psygnosis, from a steelworks to Sony

Psygnosis began in the ruins of Imagine and outlasted everyone. In 1989 ACE described its rooms above a steelworks on the Liverpool dockside, from which it sold Amiga and Atari ST games at £24.95 in boxes painted by Roger Dean. When it moved to a new building overlooking the port, it still kept the rent down: “We reckon we pay less for this space than most people in the south pay for their car parking.” Much of its catalogue came from outside developers, among them Reflections with Shadow of the Beast and DMA Design of Dundee with Lemmings.

Sony bought Psygnosis in June 1993, for a price Edge put at £30 million, and the company moved to Napier Court on the Wavertree Technology Park. Edge noted in 2010 that the building had been put up for Littlewoods’ unsuccessful bid to run the National Lottery. When the PlayStation went on sale in Britain in September 1995, WipEout, made in-house, was its best-selling game. The Psygnosis name was dropped around 2000, and the studio carried on as SCE Studio Liverpool, making WipEout and Formula One games until 2012.

Bizarre Creations and Evolution

Two independent racing studios grew up beside it. Bizarre Creations started in 1988 as Raising Hell, a small team led by Martyn Chudley, and took its permanent name in 1994. Formula 1 (1996), which it wrote for Psygnosis, was, in Retro Gamer’s account, the best-selling game in Europe that year. It went on to Metropolis Street Racer on the Dreamcast, four Project Gotham Racing games for Microsoft and Geometry Wars. In 2010 it had about 200 staff in a purpose-built studio beside Liverpool John Lennon Airport.

Evolution Studios was set up in Runcorn in 1999 by Hetherington, Martin Kenwright, Mick Hocking and staff from the flight-simulation developer Digital Image Design, which had also been based in Runcorn. It made the World Rally Championship games for the PlayStation 2 and MotorStorm, a PlayStation 3 launch game. Sony bought Evolution, and Activision bought Bizarre Creations, in 2007. Edge’s 2010 survey of Merseyside said that while “other significant developers and publishers on the Manchester side of the M62 motorway have vanished from view”, these two had kept growing. It called Hetherington, who in Edge’s view had retired from the local scene after the Evolution sale, “the godfather of the Liverpool videogame industry”.

The closures, and after

The next few years reversed that. Activision closed Bizarre Creations in 2011. On 22 August 2012 Sony told the staff of Studio Liverpool that it would close, and Retro Gamer marked the end of the studio “after 28 years” with a tribute issue in which former staff remembered Psygnosis. Sony closed Evolution Studios in March 2016; Codemasters took on much of the team the following month, and in 2022 that group was merged into EA’s Criterion Games.

The people stayed. Former Bizarre Creations staff founded Lucid Games in Liverpool, and others started smaller studios of their own. Former Studio Liverpool staff founded Firesprite in 2012, and in September 2021 Sony bought it, bringing a Liverpool team of around 250 people back into PlayStation’s own studios. Firesprite co-developed Horizon Call of the Mountain for the PlayStation VR2 in 2023. Playbox, set up in 2005 by former Psygnosis staff, and Liverpool John Moores University’s games courses were part of the same scene in 2010.

The Beatles comparison

Writers reached for the Beatles from the start. CRASH compared Imagine to the group when it visited the Sir Thomas Street offices in 1984, a short walk from where the Cavern had stood. Big K called Microdigital the scene’s Cavern. When Studio Liverpool closed, Retro Gamer began its tribute: “Like The Beatles, Psygnosis was a British institution that exploded from Liverpool.”

Sources

Big K issue 1 (April 1984), p. 14: Eugene Evans on Microdigital (“what the Cavern was to the Merseybeat and the Beatles”), Imagine’s “100-plus people” and the “ongoing soap opera”.
Big K issue 4 (July 1984), p. 20: Tony Tyler’s “Scousesoft” feature (Bug-Byte’s founders, May 1980, mail order one SAVE at a time; the three companies).
Your Computer, June and October 1981: Bug-Byte’s Coventry and Old Hall Street addresses and its Atom and ZX81 advertisements.
CRASH issue 2 (March 1984), “Imagine-ation”: the Sir Thomas Street offices and the Beatles comparison.
Your Computer, November 1984, pp. 76–77: Bruce Everiss, “Imagine: what was the name of the game?” (Merseyside’s industry, Microdigital, the universities, “high-stakes gambling”, Imagine’s mistakes, former staff and “at least five new companies on Merseyside”).
CRASH issue 12 (Christmas 1984), pp. 60–63: Roger Kean’s account of Imagine’s fall (Microdigital; Butler and Evans; the Marshall Cavendish deal; the megagames).
Sinclair User issue 24 (March 1984), p. 84: Imagine advertisement (address, Colin Stokes, “20 lines”, “COMING SOON FROM IMAGINE, PSYCLAPSE & BANDERSNATCH”). CRASH issue 3 (April 1984) and Personal Computer Games, spring 1984: the megagame advertisements.
Your Spectrum issue 7 (September 1984), p. 5: “THE MEGA-GAME’S UP!” (the receiver, the causes, the Marshall Cavendish figures, Everiss’s resignation).
CRASH issue 17 (June 1985): Denton Designs (the founding five, September 1984, Rodney Street, the Sage systems; Bandersnatch and Evans to Fireiron).
CRASH issue 18 (July 1985), news: Bug-Byte’s receivership. CRASH issue 20 (September 1985), p. 42: “Down in the Dockland”, Odin. CRASH issue 21 (October 1985): the Psygnosis stand at the PCW Show.
Alessandro Grussu, Spectrumpedia volume 1, entry on Odin Computer Graphics/Thor (Paul McKenna; Odin out of business by 1988).
ZZAP!64 issue 13 (May 1986), pp. 100–103: Colin Stokes at Ocean.
Chris Wilkins and Roger M. Kean, The History of Ocean Software (Revival Retro Events, 2013): Paul Finnegan, the Imagine name, Special FX and Rage (recollections).
Sinclair User issue 28 (July 1984), pp. 51–53: Christian Urquhart and Hunchback.
Edge issue 57 (April 1998), pp. 51–61: Rage Software, “Liverpool-based”, and its other offices.
ACE issue 24 (September 1989), p. 20: Psygnosis profile (the steelworks, the car-parking quote).
Edge issue 17 (February 1995) and issue 31 (April 1996): Sony’s purchase of Psygnosis in June 1993 for £30 million. Edge issue 27 (December 1995): WipEout at the PlayStation’s British launch. Edge issue 84 (May 2000): games credited to “SCEE (Studio Liverpool)”.
Edge issue 212 (March 2010), pp. 109–136: “Region Specific: Merseyside” (Microdigital, Hetherington as “godfather”, Wavertree and the Littlewoods lottery bid, Bizarre Creations and Evolution Studios, the Manchester side of the M62, Playbox, Liverpool John Moores University).
Retro Gamer issue 108 (November 2012), pp. 22–29: the Psygnosis/Studio Liverpool tribute (“after 28 years”; “Like The Beatles…”; John Gibson’s recollections of the early 1990s, captioned at Evolution Studios).
Retro Gamer issue 114 (May 2013), pp. 46–51: Bizarre Creations (Raising Hell, 1988; the name, 1994; Formula 1; Activision in 2007; closure in 2011; Lucid Games and the other successor studios).
“Studio Liverpool (1984-2012) - A Eulogy”, GodisaGeek.com, August 2012 (web, secondary): the closure announcement of 22 August 2012.
Wireframe issue 55 (September 2021), p. 18: Sony’s purchase of Firesprite, “set up by old Psygnosis/Studio Liverpool alums”, around 250 people.
Wikipedia, “Firesprite” (web, secondary): founding in 2012; Horizon Call of the Mountain (2023). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firesprite
Wikipedia, “Evolution Studios” (web, secondary), citing James Brightman, “Sony confirms closure of Evolution Studio”, GamesIndustry.biz, 22 March 2016; Dan Pearson, “Evolution Studios joins Codemasters”, GamesIndustry.biz, 11 April 2016; and Eurogamer, 12 May 2022, on the merger into Criterion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_Studios
Wikipedia, “Rage Games” (web, secondary): Rage’s collapse in January 2003. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rage_Games