Ian Hetherington | Code Like It's 198x

When Imagine Software was wound up in July 1984, the man who was supposed to have been watching its money was Ian Hetherington, its financial director. Within little more than a year he was on the Atari stand at the PCW Show with a new company, Psygnosis, showing a game that had begun life as one of Imagine’s unfinished megagames. Psygnosis became the publisher of Shadow of the Beast and Lemmings, Sony bought it in 1993, and WipEout came out of it two years later. Edge, surveying Merseyside’s games industry in 2010, called Hetherington “a businessman rather than a gaming visionary” and “the godfather of the Liverpool videogame industry”.

Fast facts

Imagine Software: director responsible for financial control; financial director when the company was wound up in 1984.
Psygnosis: founded in Liverpool in 1984; Hetherington ran the development side, Jonathan Ellis the business side.
Sony: sold Psygnosis to Sony in 1993; joint managing director, with Ellis, of Sony Electronic Publishing in Europe; left by mid-1998.
Afterwards: co-founder of Evolution Studios (1999); chairman of Realtime Worlds and of the face-scanning firm Digimask.
Died: December 2021, as reported on 15 and 16 December.

Imagine

Imagine Software was set up by two men from Bug-Byte, Mark Butler and Dave Lawson. Hetherington was not one of them. CRASH’s account of the company, published at the end of 1984, says that as the money poured in, Bruce Everiss was put in charge of day-to-day running, “but the responsibility for financial control and a directorship was put in the hands of Ian Hetherington”. A photograph of Imagine’s top management in the same feature shows him at the table with Everiss, Lawson, Butler and the advertising manager.

When the company collapsed, Everiss blamed financial mismanagement. Your Spectrum reported in September 1984 that Hetherington, as financial director, said little in reply and blamed the overheads of Imagine’s contract with Marshall Cavendish, adding that 300,000 to 400,000 pirated Imagine tapes had been found. CRASH was less forgiving: “All these financial aspects were supposedly the responsibility of Ian Hetherington,” it wrote, and the BBC crew filming the company’s last months found him “usually unapproachable”.

As the end came, Lawson and Hetherington were in America trying to raise money. “I didn’t run away anywhere,” Hetherington told CRASH. “I spent four weeks, day and night writing a business report. I was in America for fund-raising,” and, he said, they very nearly succeeded. The two men had formed a company called Finchspeed to take over the megagames and about 20 of the staff, and by February 1985 they were trading as Fireiron Limited from Exchange Street East in Liverpool. Sinclair User later put their position simply: they “wanted to keep the Bandersnatch team. They said they could get money in America.”

Psygnosis

The megagame Bandersnatch went to Fireiron with Eugene Evans. At the PCW Show in September 1985 CRASH saw an Atari ST game on a desk marked Psygnosis that “looked remarkably familiar to glimpsed screens of the (in)famous Bandersnatch”, with Evans demonstrating it. Your Computer found the same scene funnier: Hetherington and Lawson were at the Atari stand “showing off Bandersnatch — sorry Brataccas”, while Imagine’s former operations director, Bruce Everiss, stood on a balcony stand above them shouting “Fight, fight”. Brataccas was the new company’s first game. Two years later ACE listed “Dave Lawson and Ian Hetherington, erstwhile Imagine directors” as directors of the 16-bit software house Psygnosis.

ACE’s 1989 profile named Hetherington as the company’s founder. Jonathan Ellis, a “bizz whizz”, joined soon after, and the two roles were kept apart: Hetherington ran the programming, Ellis the business. By 1991 the American magazine Info described Psygnosis as jointly owned by the two men, and later accounts, Edge’s among them, call Ellis a co-founder.

Psygnosis sold only 16-bit games, and Hetherington explained to ACE why it began to favour the Amiga. “At that time you could release simultaneously on the ST and the Amiga. The products were virtually identical,” he said, because games were being “written down” for ST compatibility. “We took a look at the Amiga, liked what we saw, and decided to give it special attention.” The profile placed Barbarian, the first Psygnosis game released on both machines together, in the summer of 1986, but the period press shows it a year later: Psygnosis showed a demo of it as its latest game at the Atari Computer Show in April 1987, and ACE reviewed the ST version in its first issue, in October 1987.

The company did not write all its own games. Looking back in 2006, Hetherington described its method as “foster talent, yield product”. “They all came to me with the germ of an idea,” he told Edge, “a half-baked demo on an Amiga or an ST.” When Martyn Chudley, later the founder of Bizarre Creations, was writing The Killing Game Show on a single machine with floppy disks, Psygnosis lent him an ST hard drive. Martin Edmondson of Reflections remembered showing “a very early demo of Shadow Of The Beast” and “Ian and co” backing it heavily even though the ST was then outselling the Amiga by five to one. Hetherington was candid about the look the company became known for: “The concept of brand was mixed up — people didn’t know if the brand was the game, the publisher or the developer. What was in our control, at least, was the packaging, so we went for a distinctive look.” Psygnosis, he added, became “synonymous with being technology-led, and sometimes we were led by it too much”.

CD-ROM and Sony

By 1991 Hetherington, described by ACE as the “joint-boss of Psygnosis”, was steering the company into CD-ROM. “Everybody is tired of waiting for a worldwide standard for CD,” he said, and Psygnosis wrote its software to run on any machine that turned up, from the FM Towns and CDTV to the PC Engine CD-ROM. “There have been several times when we thought this project was down the drain,” he admitted. The next month he described one game in production, set inside the human body: “We’re doing fractalised blood vessels.” The first CD game to appear was Microcosm, which Edge covered in its first issue in October 1993.

Sony bought Psygnosis in June 1993; Edge later put the price at £30 million. Hetherington and Ellis became joint managing directors of Sony Electronic Publishing in Europe, reporting to Sony’s American publishing company, and Edge reported in 1996 that they had helped plan the European launch of the PlayStation while remaining “very much in charge of game development”. Looking back, Hetherington counted WipEout “the best thing we ever did”. “We very consciously said: ‘How do we take this to the mass market and get outside of the nerdy teenager market and get cool?’ It was the complete product for me in terms of positioning.”

In July 1998 Edge reported “Founder Ian Hetherington’s recent departure” from Psygnosis. Some of the developers who had worked with him saw it as the end of an era. “We always felt that when Ian’s ideals for a close-knit, friendly and passionate environment became over-ridden by ‘corporate’, that was the end of the old Psygnosis,” Chudley told Edge in 2006.

Evolution and Realtime Worlds

In 1999 Hetherington set up Evolution Studios in Runcorn with Martin Kenwright, formerly head of the flight-simulation developer Digital Image Design, Mick Hocking and half a dozen DID staff. Edge announced the new company that autumn. Evolution made the World Rally Championship games for the PlayStation 2, starting in 2001, and the PlayStation 3 launch game MotorStorm; Edge counted more than 5.5 million sales for the WRC series. Sony’s European arm bought Evolution, with its sister studio Bigbig, in September 2007, and Edge wrote in 2010 that the sale seemed to mark Hetherington’s formal retirement from the Liverpool industry.

He kept a hand elsewhere. In 2002 he helped Dave Jones, the creator of Lemmings, buy his Dundee studio out of Rage Software as Realtime Worlds, and he became its chairman. Realtime Worlds made Crackdown for the Xbox 360 and went into administration on 17 August 2010, six weeks after releasing APB. He was also chairman of Digimask, a company that put players’ faces into games. Away from work, Edge noted in 1998 that he raced his Ferrari F50 in the Ferrari-only Maranello series.

Hetherington’s death was announced by WipEout’s designer Nick Burcombe and the composer Tim Wright on 15 December 2021. “Ian Hetherington… the man who kickstarted my career in games, and always had faith in my abilities, has sadly passed away,” Wright wrote.

Sources

CRASH issue 12 (Christmas 1984), pp. 60–63: “The Biggest Commercial Break of Them All” (Hetherington given financial control and a directorship; the management photograph; “usually unapproachable”; his fund-raising quote; Finchspeed).
Your Spectrum issue 7, September 1984: Imagine’s collapse (financial director; Marshall Cavendish overheads; 300,000–400,000 pirated tapes).
CRASH issue 13, February 1985: Lawson and Hetherington trading as Fireiron Limited. Issue 17, June 1985: Bandersnatch and Eugene Evans to Fireiron. Issue 21, October 1985: the PCW Show and the Psygnosis desk.
Sinclair User issue 40, July 1985: Lawson and Hetherington wanting to keep the Bandersnatch team.
Your Computer, October 1985: Hetherington and Lawson at the Atari stand with Brataccas.
ACE issue 3, December 1987: Lawson and Hetherington as directors of Psygnosis. Issue 1, October 1987: Barbarian review (Atari ST). Issue 24, September 1989, p. 20: profile of Psygnosis (founder; Ellis; the ST and the Amiga). Issue 44, May 1991, p. 44, and issue 45, June 1991: Psygnosis and CD-ROM.
Computer Gamer issue 27, June 1987: the Atari Computer Show, 24–26 April 1987, with a demo of Psygnosis’s Barbarian.
Info issue 36, February 1991: Psygnosis jointly owned by Ellis and Hetherington.
Edge issue 1, October 1993: Microcosm. Issue 17, February 1995: Sony’s purchase for £30 million. Issue 18, March 1995: Ellis and Hetherington as joint managing directors of SEP (Europe). Issue 30, March 1996: the sale to Sony and the PlayStation launch. Issue 31, April 1996: purchase in June 1993.
Edge issue 60, July 1998: Hetherington’s departure. Issue 62, September 1998: the Maranello series. Issue 77, Autumn 1999: Evolution Studios announced.
Edge issue 162, May 2006: feature on the legacy of Psygnosis (Hetherington, Chudley, Edmondson and Burcombe quotes).
Edge issue 171, January 2007: Digimask, with Hetherington as chairman.
Edge issue 212, March 2010, pp. 109–136: “Region Specific: Merseyside” (“godfather”; Evolution Studios, 1999, its founders and sales; Sony’s purchase in September 2007).
Edge issue 220, November 2010: Realtime Worlds (the 2002 buyout; Hetherington as chairman; administration on 17 August 2010).
Alissa McAloon, “Obituary: Psygnosis co-founder Ian Hetherington”, Game Developer, 16 December 2021 (web, secondary).
Andrew Kiya, “Ian Hetherington, Founder of Wipeout Studio Psygnosis (Later Sony Studio Liverpool) Has Died”, PlayStation LifeStyle, 16 December 2021: the announcement by Burcombe and Wright; Wright’s words (web, secondary).