Company History

Dave Lawson and Ian Hetherington founded Imagine Software in Liverpool in 1982 - the same year Sinclair's ZX Spectrum arrived in shops and upended the British home computer market. The timing was not coincidence. Both men saw what the Spectrum represented: a machine with 16 kilobytes of RAM and a rubber keyboard, selling to hundreds of thousands of families at a price parents could actually justify. Somebody was going to write the games for it. They intended to be that somebody.

Lawson took the role of technical director. Hetherington led programming. From the outset the company combined genuine technical capability with an unusual instinct for promotion - and it was the combination of both that made Imagine distinctive in a market where most publishers were still operating out of bedrooms and garden sheds.

Bruce Everiss joined as marketing manager and became the company's most visible public face. Everiss had strong opinions about how a games company should present itself and was not shy about sharing them with the trade press. At a time when UK games companies often communicated in dull technical language, Imagine spoke the language of ambition.

The company released its first titles in 1982, targeting the ZX Spectrum almost exclusively. Schizoids, Cosmic Cruiser, Zzoom - these early games established a rhythm of regular releases and began building the Imagine brand. They were competent, commercially successful titles for their time. None of them hinted at what was coming next.

Arcadia changed everything. Released in 1982 as a Galaxian-style multi-wave shoot-em-up for the ZX Spectrum, it reportedly shifted over 100,000 copies - a number that would have seemed absurd for a ZX Spectrum game a year earlier. Imagine had its breakout hit, its proof of concept, and its blueprint for what came next: find the market, understand it, and move fast.

Through 1982 and 1983, Imagine maintained a publishing rate that kept the company constantly in the games press. Jumping Jack, Stonkers, Ah Diddums, Molar Maul, Pedro - each new title arrived with marketing support and packaging that reinforced the brand's visual identity. The company was hiring, expanding, and presenting itself to the world as a British technology success story at a moment when politicians were eager to celebrate exactly those kinds of stories.

Alchemist, released in 1983, demonstrated range. Where Arcadia was pure arcade action, Alchemist was an arcade adventure - a wizard who could transform into an eagle, navigating a castle environment that required exploration as much as reflexes. The ZX Spectrum version was followed by a Commodore 64 port, signalling Imagine's growing appetite for multi-platform publishing.

The revenues were real and the profile was growing. BBC producers, looking to make a programme about the new British software industry, identified Imagine as the right subject. The company was photogenic, articulate, and willing to put its offices and its founders in front of cameras. A documentary crew began filming. Nobody involved could have predicted what those cameras would end up capturing.

The Megagames announcement transformed Imagine from a successful software house into something that felt genuinely novel. In 1983-1984, the company announced two titles under a new premium label: Bandersnatch and Psyclapse. Each would be priced at £39.95 - more than three times the cost of a standard game, and justified by an equally ambitious technological proposition. The Megagames would ship with a hardware peripheral: an additional RAM cartridge that plugged into the ZX Spectrum and dramatically expanded its capabilities.

Bandersnatch was Hetherington's project - an action adventure intended to demonstrate that the Spectrum, properly augmented, could deliver an experience that no current software could match. The concept was ambitious enough to generate genuine excitement in the games press, which covered the announcements extensively and helped create the impression that something revolutionary was imminent.

Psyclapse was being developed by a separate internal team. Less is documented about its design compared to Bandersnatch - it was described in press coverage as arcade-style, but the game remained abstract enough that it existed primarily as a name and a price tag rather than a defined product.

Both projects consumed resources at a rate that the company's revenue, however strong, could not sustain indefinitely. The Megagames required hardware development alongside software development. Staff numbers had grown substantially. The offices in Liverpool projected an image of success that had a significant overhead attached to it.

The games press kept covering the Megagames. Readers kept anticipating them. And inside Imagine, the completion date kept receding.

The BBC documentary crew had come to Liverpool to film a positive profile. Paul Anderson's "Commercial Breaks" series was documenting British business success stories, and Imagine - young, profitable, making the news - was a natural subject. The crew began filming in early 1984, building what everyone expected to be a story about how the British software industry had found its feet.

In July 1984, Imagine Software went into receivership. The company's bank was Barclays. When the financial situation became irretrievable, bailiffs arrived at the Liverpool offices to begin repossessing assets. The BBC cameras, already present in the building, kept rolling.

The footage captured during those hours became something the games industry had never seen: a real-time document of a company dying, with the people who built it still in the building. Dave Lawson, Ian Hetherington, and Bruce Everiss all appear in the documentary. The atmosphere shifts in the footage from the energy of the earlier sequences to something quieter and stranger as the reality of the situation became clear.

The collapse was attributed to a combination of factors: the overambitious Megagames development timeline, staff and office costs that had grown with the company's success but did not shrink when the revenue pressure increased, and the fundamental tension between maintaining an expensive public profile and delivering the products that profile had promised.

Whether the Megagames would have succeeded commercially is unknowable. At £39.95 each, with hardware requirements, the market they were targeting was significantly smaller than the market Arcadia had reached. But they never got the chance to find out. The bailiffs arrived first.

Ocean Software, the Manchester publisher founded in 1982 by Jon Woods and David Ward, acquired Imagine's remaining assets after the collapse. Ocean was already one of the UK's strongest publishers and would go on to dominate the late 1980s home computer market. The Imagine IP passed to a company equipped to do something with it.

Ian Hetherington took a different road. In 1984, he co-founded a new company initially called Finchspeed, which would later rename itself Psygnosis. The Bandersnatch code he had been writing at Imagine came with him. Reworked substantially over the following year, it became Brataccas - released by Psygnosis in 1985, and a direct link between Imagine's ambitions and the new company's output.

In July 1984, Barclays Bank appointed a receiver. Bailiffs arrived at Imagine's offices to repossess assets. Staff who had turned up for work that morning found themselves out of a job by afternoon. The BBC cameras were still rolling. The footage captured Dave Lawson at his desk, computers being wheeled out of the building, and the physical atmosphere of a company that had ceased to exist while everyone inside it was still present to witness it.

The collapse was not a surprise to everyone. The company had been burning through money faster than it was generating it. The Megagames had not shipped and showed no sign of shipping. Key staff had left. The ambitious spending on offices and salaries that had defined Imagine's peak had not been matched by a corresponding growth in revenue.

What made the Imagine collapse significant was not merely that it happened - other software houses folded in the mid-1980s - but that it happened on camera. "Commercial Breaks" became required viewing for anyone interested in British gaming history. The bailiffs sequence in particular became a reference point for discussions of the first boom-and-bust cycle in home computer software.

Ocean Software, the Manchester-based publisher, acquired Imagine's remaining assets after the collapse. The Imagine brand would continue for a short time under Ocean's stewardship, with re-releases of existing titles. But the original Imagine Software - the Liverpool company that had burned so bright for two years - was gone.