Dave Lawson

What struck me while watching the BBC documentary The Battle for Santa's Software was the absence of Dave Lawson. He's only seen in the background of the segment about the Bandersnatch packaging. Where he is also the only person in the room who doesn't speak. I wanted to track down more information about him because Dave Lawson is the line of continuity through the founding of Imagine and into Psygnosis. He joins Bug-Byte and leaves with Mark Butler to set up Imagine. He's present through the chaos of the liquidation and Finchspeed and Fireiron and the fight over the rights to Bandersnatch. He sets up Psygnosis with fellow ex-Imagine director Ian Hetherington, and then abruptly leaves in 1988. Dave Lawson died aged 62 in August 2021. There are plenty tributes to him online but they all follow the lead of Martyn Carroll who wrote about him for Eurogamer. All the tributes hit the same basic beats of Imagine, bankruptcy, Psygnosis. I haven't done anything very much different so what I wanted to do was track down interviews with him and give him the chance to be heard in his own words.

Psygnosis

Regular readers of this blog might have worked out the area of my cone of ignorance. I have a very sharp and narrow knowledge of eighties games and software houses which gets wider and hazier into the nineties and fades out almost entirely post-millennium. What company released Rockstar Ate My Hamster? Codemasters! Who released any game in the Call Of Duty series? EA? Activision?