Imagine

5 Sir Thomas Street, Liverpool, L1

The 1984 collapse of Imagine Software was a seismic event for the UK software industry. Imagine had become one of the biggest and best known software houses in just over 18 months of existence. Its professionalism, marketing, and overall corporate image seemed to point the way for the rest of the fledgling software industry. There is also the irony that a company as obsessed by image and marketing as Imagine should have its collapse documented in real time by a BBC film crew making a documentary for a series called Commercial Breaks, "A series that follows the fortunes of entrepreneurs around the world as their stories unfold."

Imagine founders Mark Butler and David Lawson worked at fellow Liverpool software house Bug-Byte. This gave them a head start over other companies which in 1982 were just starting to learn about the whole process of getting software out there, and making money. Their experience at Bug-Byte meant Butler and Lawson already knew what was required for the day to day operation of a software company and they hit the ground running. 

Masons Buildings, Exchange Street East, Liverpool, L2

December 2021

The Masons Building is a narrow four story Grade II listed building pinned awkwardly between two newer buildings. It's also surprisingly difficult to photograph. which is why I've gone portrait orientation for a change. This was the building Imagine moved to in late 1982. "Senior staff at the Liverpool-based software company Bug-Byte have broken away to set up their own firm," was how POPULAR COMPUTING WEEKLY (6 January 1983 page 5) reported the news. "Dave Lawson, former software manager, and Mark Butler, until recently sales manager at Bug-Byte have formed a new company... Also involved in the new venture is Bug-Byte's former head programmer, Eugene Evans. The first fruits of Imagine Software have appeared in the form of Arcadia, a new game for the Spectrum and VIC-20...Bug-Byte remains undaunted by the departures. 'I gather some of our old staff have set up an outfit just up the road,' said Bug-Byte's Tony Milner. 'We are not at all worried -if anything we have become more efficient since they left.'" The same month saw the first adverts for Arcadia in COMPUTER AND VIDEOGAMES and YOUR COMPUTER. Take a look through that issue of YOUR COMPUTER. Imagine's advert is comparable to the double page spread for Thorn EMI , or dk'tronics advert on page two, or the other double page advert for, you guessed it, Bug-Byte. At the time Thorn EMI, dk'tronics and Bug-Byte were (relatively speaking) veteran companies, and here's a brand new upstart company going head to head with them. No wonder Imagine seemed to spring into being fully formed and ready to take on the world.

Microdigital, 25 Brunswick Street, Liverpool, L2

December 2021

A key location in the Liverpool computer scene and the rise of Imagine was Microdigital. It was founded in 1978 by Bruce Everiss, and was one of the first dedicated computer shops in the UK. By 1979  it was also publishing a bi-monthly computer magazine called LIVERPOOL SOFTWARE GAZETTE which ran until 1981. You can download and read copies here. Mark Butler worked at Microdigital before joining Bug-Byte and invited Bruce to work at Imagine in 1982. Imagine programmer Eugene Evans was a Saturday assistant at Microdigital before also moving on to Bug-Byte, where he met Matthew Smith and became the star of level 5 of Manic Miner, Eugene's Lair. He's also ground zero for any stories you've read about teen-whizzkid programmers earning huge salaries and driving fast cars.

Imagine's first game Arcadia was a big success. CRASH (September 1984 page 4) in the aftermath of the company's collapse reported Mark Butler as being heard to say 75% of all Spectrum owners had brought the game. CRASH was sceptical, pointing out that was potentially up to 375,000 copies sold in a market where sales over 40,000 were considered marvellous. I can only give anecdotal evidence but I can remember a point around late 1983/early 1984 when it seemed like every Spectrum owner had played the same five games; Ant Attack, Manic Miner, Jetpac, Trans Am, and Arcadia. 

Imagine was in the right place at the right time. The same issue of POPULAR COMPUTING WEEKLY which reports Imagine's arrival also reports that rival Bug-Byte is to stop selling games via mail order and concentrate on retail. Imagine would quickly follow suit. Shops were hungry for product and Imagine was able to provide professionally presented software for all the major computers. In 1983 Arcadia was quickly followed by Ah Diddums (Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum), Frantic (VIC-20), Schizoids (Spectrum), Jumping Jack (Atari 8-bit, Dragon 32/64, Spectrum), Zzoom (Spectrum), Molar Maul (Spectrum), Wacky Waiters (VIC-20), Zip-Zap (Spectrum), Bewitched (VIC-20), and Catcha Snatcha (VIC-20). By June 1983 Imagine were running unprecedented 6 page full colour advertising spreads, like this one from C&VG (May 1983 page 76).

In March 1983 HOME COMPUTING WEEKLY said, "Mark [Butler] reckons the number of staff will never exceed 25 -'more than that and it would start getting less efficient'." (March 8-14 page 26). Yet, by the end of the year Imagine were advertising "urgently" for 30 programmers; POPULAR COMPUTING WEEKLY (29 September 1983 page 46). What had changed? At some point Imagine signed a deal with publisher Marshall Cavendish to produce games for INPUT, a partwork magazine about programming which was printed from 1984-585. "[The deal] may have been worth as much as £11 million to Imagine," speculated CRASH (January 1985 page 61). "Marshall Cavendish became disenchanted by the lack of progress on their games. They had already paid out a lot of money and seem to have been unhappy with the quality of what was ready. They pulled out and wanted their money back. But Imagine had taken on more people to cope... None of these were laid off. The overheads went up alarmingly." POPULAR COMPUTING WEEKLY wrote about the aftermath of the deal in March 1984 in a front page article headlined "Imagine -back from the brink." "Some 30 software titles -six games, with versions for five micros- written under contract have been rejected... Explained Imagine's General Manager Bruce Everiss:'There was a difference of opinion... the contract was terminated amicably'... To further increase Imagine's embarrassment, Marshall Cavendish forked out a substantial sum of money -rumoured to be in the region of £1/2m- ... Imagine must now pay this back in 12 monthly instalments, beginning in April. Imagine has also announced to the trade that it intends to reduce the retail price of all its existing games software from £5.50 to £3.95 in the near future."

The Marshall Cavendish deal was domino one. CRASH elaborated on domino two in the December article. "In 1982 there had been a software shortage in the shops. 1983 was to be a boom time and Imagine decided on a clever ploy to foil the duplication of their rivals tapes. Ahead of time they booked the entire duplicating capacity of Kiltdale, one of the biggest duplicators for the software business. The idea, obviously, was to make it impossible for other major companies to get enough tapes duplicated for the Christmas rush. On paper it looked like an elegant piece of industrial sabotage. In practice it backfired. Imagine ended up hiring a warehouse for the storage of the hundreds of thousands of cassettes that they ended up with. After Christmas the bottom fell out of the market, and there was no way they could shift the games. This was a principal reason behind the strange move to lower the price of Imagine software. It also backfired because they flooded the shops with non-selling tapes, and then expected everyone to like the fact that the tapes would have to be sold at a price lower than the wholesale price the shopkeepers had bought the tapes in for in the first place."

Domino three was the megagames.

5 Sir Thomas Street, Liverpool, L1

December 2021

Imagine moved to new offices in early 1984, around the same time new adverts began appearing. "They may be smiling now but they are about to encounter... PSYCLAPSE & BANDERSNATCH" was the tagline in this advert from C&VG (February 1984 page 156) over a picture of Imagine's core programming team Ian Weatherburn, Mike Glover, John Gibson, and Eugene Evans. With typical understatement this advert was followed up by more, and more, and more. So what were Psyclapse and Bandersnatch? Details were sketchy. "Not computer games that would be an inadequate description... more a collection of concepts that add up to a total home leisure experience," C&VG (August 1984 page 24). "They will be an environmental experience, where the player will take part in role playing games," YOUR SPECTRUM (July 1984 page 56). 

The price was rumoured to be an unprecedented £40, almost a third of the cost of a ZX Spectrum at the time, and about £136 in today's prices. Psyclapse and Bandersnatch would be so spectacular they would require a hardware add-on to expand the power of the humble home computer. Mikro-Gen did something similar a year later and invested £130,000 in their Mikro Plus system, and the company never really recovered from its failure. With the programming teams working on Psyclapse and Bandersnatch the only games available for release were those rejected by Marshall Cavendish. Pedro, released at the new £3.95 price, rated 62% in CRASH (May 1984 page 84) and was described as "fair to average". 

Spending on offices. Spending on megagames. Spending on marketing. Spending on staff. The business was unsustainable and the axe fell on 2nd July 1984. "IMAGINE, the flamboyant Liverpool software company, whose financial problems have been deepening since February, is now insolvent." Was how POPULAR COMPUTING WEEKLY (5-11 July 1984 page 1) broke the news. The company's debts were estimated at £400,000 but over time this crept up to over £1 million. 

Commercial Breaks: The Battle for Santa's Software

"The Battle for Santa's Software. This Christmas every high street will witness a battle of fantasy giants. Kong, Kokotoni Wilf , Zaxxon and Kentilla are part of the high-reward but high-risk computer games industry, suddenly worth £30 million a year. Commercial Breaks follows two companies as they seek a Christmas top ten hit. The whiz-kids of Imagine believe in the all-new Megagame - for the programmers at Ocean, it has to be a new version of last year's hero, Hunchback. But there are many other invaders on the way...."

Commercial Breaks aired on BBC2 at 8pm on Thursday 13th December between Open Space and Food & Drink. The 30 minute documentary can be watched here (note, the audio is muted from about 1:06 to 2:10 to avoid copyright problems with the backing music, Space Age Whiz Kids by Joe Walsh). It's required viewing. Stand out moments for me include the brutal close-up of Chris Hedges, managing director of Imagine's distributor, as he reacts with disbelief to the proposed price of £40 for Bandersnatch; or the shot of Imagine's cassette duplicator from Kiltdale "waiting for £50,000 that Imagine owes him." When I was in Liverpool I didn't know the address of the office shown at 19: 05 which turns out to be Tithebarn House, another Imagine office on the corner of Chapel Street and Old Hall Street. It's just down the road from Bug-Byte's old Liverpool office in the Albany building. 

This wasn't the end for Imagine. A team of ex-programmers founded Denton Designs and went on to write innovative programmes like Shadowfire, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, and The Great Escape. Beau Jolly brought Imagine's back catalogue in a deal which, CRASH reported, they believed included the rights to the megagames but didn't. Even the Imagine name persisted. Manchester rivals Ocean brought the rights to the company name and logo, and relaunched the brand in 1985 to focus mainly on conversions of arcade games. The new label started with World Series Baseball. A game originally developed by Imagine which can be briefly spotted in Commercial Breaks, at around 2:21. And the megagames? One was finally released, sort of, in 1985 for the Amiga and Atari ST, by Ian Hetherington and David Lawson's new company Psygnosis. Brataccas was based on Bandersnatch and when you see it playing it does resemble the game glimpsed in Commercial Breaks. Meanwhile, the liquation process dragged on for another seven years and Imagine was finally dissolved on 7 August 1991 according to Companies House.