Psygnosis

» see psygnosis.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Psygnosis did its best work in a window that shut before i had a modem. The amiga years ran roughly 1988 to 1993 and i was between four and nine for all of them, in a country where an amiga was a rare and expensive object rather than a household one. What reached me later was the logo, which kept turning up on splash screens long after i had any idea which company it belonged to.

The company started in Liverpool in 1984, assembled by Ian Hetherington and David Lawson out of the collapse of Imagine Software, which had gone under that same year with a BBC documentary crew filming it. Jonathan Ellis came in alongside them. The name has a silent p and almost nobody ever managed it.

What Psygnosis sold, before it sold any games, was the impression that a game was worth buying. Roger Dean, who had painted album sleeves for Yes, did the owl and the red border. On a shelf full of hand-drawn amiga boxes, a Psygnosis box looked like a record.

The games behind those boxes were uneven and everybody knew it. Shadow of the Beast in 1989 had something like a dozen layers of parallax scrolling and was genuinely difficult to enjoy playing. It did not matter. It was a demonstration of what the hardware could do, and it sold on exactly that.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it published ~

In 1991 Psygnosis published Lemmings, made by DMA Design in Dundee, a studio that would later rename itself Rockstar North. Lemmings sold in the millions on more or less every machine that existed, and it is one of the very few games of that decade you could show to a parent once and then leave them alone with.

The rest of the catalog leaned on Reflections in Newcastle, who made Shadow of the Beast and later Destruction Derby. Psygnosis was a publisher first, and its real skill was picking small british studios and putting a serious cover on their work.

~ the sony years ~

Sony Computer Entertainment bought the company in 1993 for twenty million pounds, before the PlayStation existed as something anyone could buy. It turned out to be one of the better purchases in the industry. In the 1995 to 1996 financial year, Psygnosis titles accounted for 40 percent of all video game sales in Europe.

WipEout arrived in 1995 with art direction from The Designers Republic and a soundtrack carrying Leftfield and The Chemical Brothers, plus original music by Tim Wright under the name CoLD SToRAGE. Sony put playable units in nightclubs. The racing was not really the point. The point was to make a games console into something a twenty-five year old would admit to owning, and it worked.

~ the postmortem ~

The Psygnosis name was being phased out by 1999 and was gone by 2000, replaced with SCE Studio Liverpool. Sony kept the studio on the Formula One license, roughly a game a year from 2001 through 2007, and on WipEout, which got a strong PSP entry in 2005 and then WipEout HD.

On 22 august 2012 Sony announced the closure. Michael Denny, then vice president of Sony Worldwide Studios Europe, told the staff. The stated reason was a review of european resources. WipEout 2048 had shipped that february as a Vita launch title and was the last thing the studio ever made.

The building stayed. Sony kept other departments in Liverpool and the address did not change. What ended was a twenty-eight year old company that had been bought, renamed, and then closed under the name it was given rather than the one it earned.

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