David Lawson | Code Like It's 198x

In 1983 Computer and Video Games sent a writer to Liverpool to meet the programmer it called “the country’s top games programmer”. David Lawson was 23. He had taught himself machine code on a kit computer, written games for Bug-Byte, and co-founded Imagine Software, whose first game, Arcadia, he had written himself. He had just taken delivery of a new Ferrari, and he told the magazine his plan: “To become the biggest software company in the world and to become a public company by 1985.”

Imagine was wound up instead, in July 1984, in front of a BBC camera crew. Lawson went on to design and code the early games of Psygnosis, the company that rose from Imagine’s wreck, and in 1990 he started a developer of his own.

Merchant navy to machine code

Lawson was born in Liverpool and, by his own account to C&VG, left school and home at 15. At 17 he joined the merchant navy as a trainee engineer, and found it dull: “They make you spend about four years at college before you get anywhere near a ship.” He left in the summer of 1979 and spent the next stretch on odd jobs and hitch-hiking through Spain, Italy, France and Germany.

Computers came through reading. “I’m a compulsive reader. I read anything,” he said. He started on electronics magazines, Electronics Today International in particular, saw an advertisement for the Nascom kit computer and bought one from Microdigital, a Liverpool computer shop. “It took me about a week to learn machine code. I didn’t bother with basic. I couldn’t see the point.” In 1990 The Games Machine added that his interest had first been sparked by the MK14, the kit computer sold by Clive Sinclair’s Science of Cambridge. CRASH later named Lawson and Mark Butler among the young enthusiasts who gathered around Microdigital before the shop was sold to Laskys.

Bug-Byte

Bug-Byte, a young Liverpool software house, took him on after he showed its bosses how to use one of their new computers, according to the 1983 profile. That profile, and another in The Games Machine in 1990, credit him with three early Bug-Byte games: Spectral Invaders for the ZX Spectrum, Space Warp for the BBC Micro, and Vicmen, a Pac-Man copy for the VIC-20. C&VG called them the first commercially produced games for each machine, a claim the magazine made without giving dates. It said Lawson wrote Spectral Invaders from a pre-print copy of the Spectrum manual, before he had a finished machine to test it on, so that Bug-Byte was “gambling that the manual and Lawson’s interpretation of it were one hundred per cent accurate”. He followed it with Spectres, the game whose earnings, the magazine said, let him go into business for himself.

Vicmen did not stay on sale. C&VG reported that it was withdrawn under threat of legal action from Atari, which held the Pac-Man rights. Eugene Evans, then a fellow Bug-Byte programmer, told Retro Gamer in 2012 that Bug-Byte received a cease and desist order: “We were told to take it off the market and ship them all the copies, which we did.”

Imagine

Lawson and Butler, Bug-Byte’s sales manager, left in the second half of 1982. Big K dated Lawson’s departure to July 1982, with Butler following two months later; Imagine’s operations director Bruce Everiss later said Lawson was given notice late that year. CRASH says the pair left “after several disagreements with the Bug-Byte management” and set up Imagine “in a small front room”. The Imagine and Bug-Byte entries weigh the different accounts.

Lawson had written Arcadia, a fast space shoot-’em-up, and Butler sold it into shops over Christmas 1982. It was a hit on the Spectrum and was converted for the VIC-20 and the Commodore 64. By late 1983 C&VG listed Lawson as the designer and programmer of Ah Diddums and Schizoids as well, though it noted that running a growing company had pulled him away from the keyboard. He talked about building a software development “environment” of tools, programmers and artists working together: “There is no quick way of writing a good game. We brain storm our programmers all day.”

That idea became the megagames. CRASH’s account of Imagine’s collapse says Lawson was “largely responsible for overseeing” the development of Bandersnatch and Psyclapse, and that he welcomed the BBC’s cameras as a chance to record “the concept, development and creative effort” of the team for posterity. Stephen Blower, who designed Imagine’s advertising, told the magazine that Lawson “had some greater vision of what could be produced in software than anyone else I’ve ever met.” The artist Steve Cain remembered the brief less fondly. “Dave Lawson came to us and said ‘You’ve got four weeks to produce the best game graphics the world has ever seen’,” he told Sinclair User in 1985. “We took four months and it still wasn’t finished.”

The money ran out first. As the end came, Lawson and the finance director Ian Hetherington were in America trying to raise funds, and the two of them set up a new company to carry on the megagames with some of the staff. The Imagine Software entry tells the story of the collapse.

Psygnosis

The new company became Psygnosis, and Lawson designed its early games. The Games Machine wrote at the end of 1987 that his “strong influence” as “driving force behind Imagine’s famed but fated Bandersnatch ‘mega-game’ team” showed in the first Psygnosis game, Brataccas, which “drew on Lawson’s experience in designing Bandersnatch”. ACE listed “Dave Lawson and Ian Hetherington, erstwhile Imagine directors” as the company’s directors.

He designed and coded Psygnosis’s Barbarian (1987), with animation and graphics by Garvan Corbett, and the pair followed it with Obliterator (1988), a flick-screen science-fiction adventure for the Atari ST and Amiga. Commodore User reported Psygnosis’s claim that Obliterator had cost £250,000 to make.

Kinetica

By 1990 Lawson had left. The Games Machine reported that Psygnosis had become more interested in commissioning, improving and marketing games than in developing them, and that this was one reason he went. He founded a development company, Kinetica, whose first game, The Gold of the Aztecs, US Gold published in 1990 for the Amiga, Atari ST and PC. Zzap! spotted a family resemblance: “Dave has rewritten the Barbarian system to create a much more fluid character movement”.

Kinetica’s selling point was its tools. Lawson told The Games Machine that artists, not programmers, should build games. Programmers, he said, “are not always creative”; artists usually are. Kinetica’s system ran on an Apple Macintosh, used another computer as its colour display, and let artists put the game together by pointing and clicking. The Gold of the Aztecs was built from about 26,000 separate pieces of graphics drawn in Deluxe Paint 3, and its hero could do more than 300 different things in 1,500 frames of animation. Lawson was evasive when the magazine asked how a game could contain “no code”, and he was dismissive about Imagine’s legend too: much of what had been written about it, he said, had been invented to make a good story, like a Sunday-paper scoop.

Public sources say little about Lawson’s work after the early 1990s.

Sources

Computer and Video Games Yearbook (EMAP, 1983, for 1984), pp. 10–11: Eugene Lacey’s “Games Designer Interview” with Dave Lawson (age 23, Liverpool, school, merchant navy, hitch-hiking, Electronics Today International, the Nascom from Microdigital, the machine-code quote, joining Bug-Byte, Spectral Invaders, Space Warp, Vic Men and the Atari threat, Spectres, Arcadia, Ah Diddums, Schizoids, the Ferrari and his plans).
CRASH, issue 2 (March 1984), “Imagine-ation”: Microdigital, Lawson and Butler; issue 12 (Christmas Special, December 1984), pp. 60–63: Lawson’s background at Bug-Byte, Arcadia, the megagames, the BBC and Stephen Blower’s comment.
Big K, issue 4 (July 1984): Lawson’s departure from Bug-Byte in July 1982.
Your Computer, November 1984, pp. 76–77: Bruce Everiss on Lawson being “given notice in late 1982”.
Sinclair User, issue 40 (July 1985), p. 58: Chris Bourne, “Whatever became of the Imagine team” (Steve Cain’s brief for Bandersnatch; Lawson and Hetherington and the American money).
Retro Gamer, issue 108 (November 2012), p. 89: Eugene Evans on Vic-Men, “a Pac-Man clone written by Dave Lawson”, and the cease and desist order. Issue 109 (December 2012), p. 88: Evans again on Lawson’s Vic-Men for Bug-Byte.
The Games Machine, issue 2 (December 1987/January 1988), p. 67: Barbarian (Psygnosis) “designed and coded by Lawson”, Brataccas and Bandersnatch. Issue 7 (June 1988), p. 36: Obliterator, “design/coding by David Lawson and graphics by Garvan Corbett”.
ACE, issue 3 (December 1987): Lawson and Hetherington as Psygnosis directors.
Commodore User, June 1988, p. 94: Psygnosis’s claim that Obliterator cost £250,000.
The Games Machine, issue 33 (August 1990), pp. 7–8: “Kinetic Energy” and “Dave Lawson: Year One” (the MK14; his Bug-Byte games for the VIC-20, BBC Micro and Spectrum; Kinetica, the Macintosh system, The Gold of the Aztecs, leaving Psygnosis). The same article in the Italian edition, TGM issue 23 (September 1990), pp. 10–11.
Zzap!, issue 64 (August 1990), p. 55: The Gold of the Aztecs from US Gold; Kinetica formed by Lawson, “a designer for Psygnosis”.
Zero, issue 12, and The One, issue 25 (October 1990), and Computer and Video Games, issue 108 (November 1990): US Gold advertisements for The Gold of the Aztecs (“© 1989, 1990 Kinetica Software”; Atari ST and PC).