|
|
| Founded By: | Mark Butler, David Lawson, Eugene Evans |
| Location: | Masons Building, Exchange Street East, Liverpool L2 3PN. England |
| Year Started: | 1982 |
| Year Wound Up: | 1984 |
| Titles in Database: | 66 |
| Rights Now With: | Ocean Software (1989) |
| | |
| | |
| | |
| When Mark Lawson and David Butler founded Imagine in 1983, they launched perhaps the UK industry's most spectacular boom-and-bust story. Within months they were churning out hit games for the ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64, had lavish offices in Liverpool, and were doing features for major newspapers as part of the explosion in computer software sales. The company invested in sales and marketing teams, made multi-lingual packaging and put its programmers in offices. Two so-called Mega Games were announced - Spectrum titles that would come with hardware add-ons to vastly expand the abilities of the platform. The announced titles Bandersnatch and Psyclapse were never released however. By mid-1984 they collapsed, citing massive debts, especially to magazines for advertising.
Butler and Lawson were key figures at Psygnosis, while the Imagine name was bought by Ocean, who mainly used it for Konami arcade conversions - Bubble Bobble and Arkanoid were notable successes - before phasing the label out in the late 80s. |
Titles per Year
Breakdown by Genre
Breakdown by Platform
|
The Retro Isle team
Added: 6 Oct 2025
Click here to view a list of titles we have in the database here at Retro Isle. |
Crash! Issue 12
Added: 28 May 2011
THE BIGGEST COMMERCIAL BREAK OF THEM ALL
A look at the crash of Imagine Software as seen through the eyes of a film crew.
[This documentary is now available as a transcript. Thanks to those who made this possible. — Matthew]
Depending on when you read this article, you may be about to see, have seen or maybe missed, a fascinating programme on BBC2 television (December 13th at 8.00pm) in the Commercial Breaks series about Imagine Software Limited. The Liverpool software giant crashed out during the summer after a life of a little over 18 months, during which time it produced more hype than any other software house before. The company appeared to bask in self-created publicity, much of which was very clever, and so it seems appropriate that its death should also have been as well recorded for posterity by the media it sought for its promotion, as had its successes in life. As things turned out, the BBC film crew got a rather different story to the one they had conceived but much of the material shot for Commercial Breaks cannot appear in the finished programme, because it falls outside the scope of the series format.
Roger Kean spoke to BBC director Paul Andersen as he was busy putting the finishing touches to the programme.
GIVE US A BREAK
Early in the new year of 1984 BBC Television director Paul Andersen, who among other things was about to direct some of the programmes for the Commercial Breaks series, witnessed the enthusiasm surrounding some of the new generation of computer games that were beginning to appear in the shops, and appreciated that the emerging software houses were pioneering a new market. Commercial Breaks is a series which broadly examines the struggles of individuals and companies who are trying to ‘break’ a new product into the market place. To Andersen the new computer game software ‘moguls’ seemed like a good subject for a programme and he began researching, looking for a suitable company to feature.
An obvious place to look was in computer magazines, and it rapidly became apparent that Imagine was a strong contender because of the spate of clever advertising that was then appearing which was designed for Imagine by Stephen Blower of Studio Sting, an offshoot company of Imagine, coupled with the fact that Andersen, like so many people in Britain, was reading the national press publicity about Imagine’s teenage programmer Eugene Evans, who was said to be earning £35,000 a year and could afford a fabulously expensive car when he was still too young to be able to drive it. There was obviously a story here for Commercial Breaks.
The next step was to approach Imagine and ask the owners whether they would mind being featured. So Andersen travailed to Liverpool and spoke to the young bosses of the new company, Mark Butler and David Lawson. Lawson had written Arcadia, Imagine’s biggest hit at the time, and Butler had sold it into shops starved of software over the 82 Christmas. At first they seemed a bit reluctant, and Imagine’s Operations Manager, Bruce Everiss, explained that there were too many things under wraps to allow in the prying eves of television. On the other hand the publicity-eager Everiss must have been able to see the promotional capital that could be made out of having BBC TV hanging around for some weeks making a film about them. Dave Lawson saw another angle altogether, and to appreciate this it’s worth remembering what put Liverpool on the map in the early sixties.
BIRTH OF AN INDUSTRY
The Beatles transformed British (and then world) pop music in the early sixties, and created a modern myth about Liverpool, their home city. Over the years Liverpool has come to see itself as a possibly undernourished and underprivileged city, but one bursting at the seams with imagination and guts. With the eighties something similar to the Beatles seemed to be happening, only in computer software this time, and Dave Lawson must have seen Imagine as being at its very centre. Stephen Blower says that, ‘Lawson had some greater vision of what could be produced in software than anyo |
TheOceanExperience
Added: 1 Jun 2011
May 23rd 2006
The Imagine Label - Why did Ocean stop using it?
Gary Bracey (ex-Ocean development manager) writes:-
"No big revelation here. It just sort of petered out. I think the line between what was strictly an Ocean label and what was Imagine got blurred a little.
Imagine was originally intended for arcade conversions, but then when we created subsequent Renegade titles (for instance), then the rule got a little fuzzy. There was no deliberate plan to end Imagine, it just sort of happened.
In the end, the decision to promote the Ocean brand above all else became the mandate, thus starting the gradual fade-out of Imagine." |
|
