Ian Hetherington
Out of Imagine, into the Amiga
A director of Imagine Software who came out of its 1984 collapse and co-founded Psygnosis in Liverpool — then made the commercial decision that shaped the British Amiga era: stop treating the Amiga as the Atari ST's twin.
Ian Hetherington was a director of Imagine Software and, after its collapse, a founder of Psygnosis — the company that carried Liverpool’s games industry from the wreckage of the 8-bit era into the Amiga years and eventually into Sony’s.
ACE recorded the transition plainly at the end of 1987: Hetherington and David Lawson, former Imagine directors, were by then running a 16-bit software house in Psygnosis.
The decision that mattered
Interviewed by ACE as company founder in September 1989, Hetherington described the point at which Psygnosis stopped doing what everyone else did.
In the mid-eighties, he explained, a publisher could release on the Atari ST and the Amiga simultaneously and ship near-identical products — because games were being written down to stay ST-compatible. Psygnosis looked at the Amiga, liked what it saw, and decided to give it special attention instead.
That is a commercial decision rather than a technical one, and it is the origin of the company’s reputation. Everything Psygnosis is remembered for visually — the parallax showcases, the technical ambition, the premium £24.95 positioning — follows from choosing to build for the better machine rather than the common denominator.
⚠ Worth noting what it cost. Writing for the Amiga specifically meant ST owners got a lesser version rather than an equal one, which is the same trade-off in reverse.
What he said about the early games
The same interview supplies dates the Psygnosis entry had wrong. Brataccas, the company’s first game, reached the Atari ST before the machine was on sale in Britain. Barbarian followed in the summer of 1986, on Amiga and ST at once.
Afterwards
Hetherington’s career continued past Psygnosis’s absorption into Sony. A 2002 retrospective records him working with Martin Kenwright — formerly of the flight-simulation house Digital Image Design — on a new studio, Evolution Studios, whose debut was the World Rally Championship series.
⚠ That comes from a single non-English source and is recorded here as reported.
See also
- Psygnosis — the company he founded.
- Imagine Software — where he came from.
- David Lawson — his co-founder.
- Liverpool games scene