Imagine Software

~ the last words ~

Imagine died the year i was born, on an island i would not see for another twenty years, over a bill smaller than the price of a used car. There is no memory to offer here. What exists instead is footage, because a BBC crew went to Liverpool in 1984 to make a series about the new software business and ended up filming a bankruptcy from the inside, which means the last weeks of this company are better recorded than the entire lives of most companies.

Mark Butler and David Lawson left Bug-Byte and registered Imagine Software on 17 September 1982, taking a handful of Bug-Byte people with them. Bruce Everiss came in to run operations and the press. The first releases were the kind of thing a Spectrum owner bought on impulse for a few pounds, Arcadia and Wacky Waiters, and they sold in numbers that nobody in that industry had budgeted for. Within a year Imagine had a hundred staff and the largest advertising spend in the sector.

The advertising was the product as much as the games were. Imagine sold the idea that writing games in Liverpool was a way out, and its best known asset was a sixteen year old programmer named Eugene Evans, put in front of the national press as a teenager earning thirty five thousand pounds a year who could buy a Lotus before he was legally allowed to drive one. He had never been paid anything close to it. The story was invented and it worked anyway, which tells you what the company was actually good at.

What it was not good at shows up in the liquidation record. No VAT returns and no bank reconciliations. Everiss later put it plainly: no financial control at all. Winding up petitions started arriving on 16 April 1984, the duplicator Kiltdale was owed sixty thousand pounds, and the overdraft sat at a hundred and twelve thousand. VNU Business Press issued a writ on 28 June over unpaid advertising in Personal Computer Games. Ten thousand pounds. The company could not find it, and on 9 July 1984 the High Court in London made an unopposed winding up order.

~ the record ~

~ the megagames ~

The plan that was supposed to save Imagine was a category it invented in its own advertising. Six Megagames, sold at around thirty pounds when the going rate was five, each shipped with a hardware add-on that plugged into the back of the machine. Two were named in public. Bandersnatch was under real development by John Gibson and did exist as code. Psyclapse existed as a paper sketch and six thousand pounds of Roger Dean box art commissioned before anyone had written a line of it.

Lawson and Ian Hetherington set up a separate company called Finchspeed while Imagine was going down, quietly, to hold the megagame work clear of the liquidator. Butler was offered a third of it without being told first. Bandersnatch never shipped under that name. Its descendant came out in 1986 as Brataccas, and by then the label on the box said Psygnosis.

~ the day the bailiffs came ~

Paul Anderson's documentary went out on BBC Two on 13 December 1984 as Commercial Breaks: The Race For Santa's Software. The crew had been given access to a growing company and stayed while it stopped being one. The footage includes the moment the bailiffs arrive to lock the offices, and it includes Butler racing at the Isle of Man TT in June on a team the company was still paying for while creditors queued.

It is the only film of its kind from that era, and it is the reason Imagine is remembered at all instead of being one more name on a list of 1984 casualties. The BBC put it back online in 2025. Forty years on it plays less like a business documentary than like watching someone lose a house on a horse.

~ what came out of the wreck ~

Ocean Software bought the Imagine label and kept using it as a budget brand for years, which is why cassettes carrying that logo exist with nothing of the original company in them, and Beau Jolly took the game rights. Around twenty staff went to Finchspeed. Roughly sixty went nowhere.

The rest of them stayed in Liverpool. Denton Designs was formed out of ex-Imagine programmers within months. Hetherington and Lawson turned Finchspeed into Psygnosis, which spent the next decade being the most serious looking publisher in Europe and eventually sold itself to Sony for twenty million pounds. Merseyside kept making games for thirty more years on the back of a company that could not pay a magazine. In 2018 Netflix borrowed the name Bandersnatch for an episode about a doomed 1984 game developer, and enough people got the reference that the joke landed.

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