[2] Back in June 2025 the BBC Archive channel uploaded a copy of their documentary The Battle For Santa's Software. It had been knocking around online for years but usually in terrible quality. The BBC's version was, as you might expect, pristine. This got a lot of attention which I piggybacked on by writing an annotated version, using whatever crossed my mind while I was watching. I thought it went pretty well and obviously the temptation was there to do it again, if I ever found something suitable.
That something suitable turned out to be another upload from BBC Archive which went up a month before The Battle For Santa's Software and acts as a prequel. A filmed report from Riverside which covers Imagine Software in their late 1983 pomp and just under a year from their very public collapse. This is Mike Andrews Meets The Computer Game Stars.
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| LIVERPOOL ECHO Monday 24 October page 2 |
Time: 00.00. A finger presses a button on a high-tech control panel. The music is Space Age Whiz Kids by Joe Walsh.
00.01. A car drives towards the camera. I recognise the view. It's Mann Island, the road between the Port of Liverpool building and the site of what would become, in 1986, a Robert Smith Mercedes dealership. The Robert Smith group of companies provided a shelter for Psygnosis in their early years from 1985-88. It's deeply ironic that a report about Imagine Software should begin at the birth place of the company which rose from their ashes. See the Psygnosis article for more.
00.02. The driver of the car is Mark Butler, one of the two founders of Imagine. This footage was lifted and slightly reordered for The Battle For Santa's Software. It's weird it appears here because this same footage was edited out of the BBC Archive upload of Santa. I assumed this was done for music rights reasons. Less than 30 seconds of Space Age Whiz Kids is used here, compared to 40-50 seconds in Santa. Maybe that's a significant amount. I do have an alternative theory. Watching a much more murky copy of Santa, uploaded 18 years ago, shows the cut sequence ends with a photo of Imagine's operations director Bruce Everiss accepting a C&VG Golden Joystick award from Dave Lee Travis. He has very much been persona non grata at the BBC since his 2014 conviction for indecent assault and the editing may have been done to remove his photo.
00.03. The red brick building in the back of this shot is the headquarters of Merseyside Police. On the other side of the road was Canning Place. An unlovely trio of early seventies office blocks. One of them, Mulberry House, was the home of Bug-Byte Software who Mark Butler left in order to set up Imagine. Bug-Byte only moved into the building in June 1983, mere months before this shot was filmed. It's hard not to feel Mark Butler is being a bit vainglorious, driving in the fruits of his success past the office of his previous employer. If you think its a bit of a stretch to suggest Butler knew where Bug-Byte were based; Imagine knew Bug-Byte had moved because they ran a good luck advert in PERSONAL COMPUTER NEWS.
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| PERSONAL COMPUTER NEWS June 10-June 15 1983 page 58 |
Once again, this footage gives a sense of a looming future because in 1985 Canning Place would also house Odin Computer Graphics where several refugees from Imagine would end up; including, briefly, Mark Butler himself.
00.04. Mark Butler drives a grey BMV 735i, registration number TLB7. Thanks to the awesome privacy invading power of the internet, I can confirm this registration is still valid and being used on a blue Bentley.
00.09. The pale building with loads of windows in the back of shot is the north side of the Royal Liver Building. Is Mark Butler just driving round and round the city centre?
00.11. "Hello. Get me Liverpool 236 8100." Mark Butler makes a call on his state of the art car phone. The telephone number is for Imagine's office at 5 Sir Thomas Street, Liverpool.
00.13. The lovely high resolution footage means we get a good view of Mark Butler's watch. This shot was taken around 3.20pm.
00.21. When Mark Butler's car swings round the corner, check out the open-topped red car on the left of the picture. It's a weird looking thing.
[00.02-00.24. Liverpool has seen a lot of redevelopment since 1983. A lot of the streets Mark Butler drives round probably don't look the same any more. If you recognise any of the roads please email or leave a comment.
00.26. The Imagine Software car park. Mark Butler and Dave Lawson pretend they have just arrived at work for the camera. I'm not a car guy, I think Dave Lawson drives a Ferrari 308. I've no idea what the red car with the spoiler is.
00.27. Where is this car park? Checking the address on old adverts, Imagine were based at Masons Buildings, Exchange Street East, until around September 1983 when the address was updated to 5 Sir Thomas Street. Nosing around the back of Sir Thomas Street on Streetview suggests the building has no parking. The back of Masons Buildings does, so it could be there. I think it's more likely to be elsewhere. When Imagine Software went under the LIVERPOOL ECHO ran an entertaining story about the "men from Imagine" who "lived life in the fast lane as they presented the pop star image on a sea of champagne and cocktails." (Friday 6 July 1984). The story noted in passing how employees "built up hundreds of pounds of parking fines outside their offices [by then at Tithebarn House] when they had contract parking spaces just 200 yards away." I reckon that's the car park we see in this film.
00.35. Dave Lawson and Mark Thomas in the Imagine reception. There's a looped robot voice droning out "Wel.Come. To. Imagine. Soft.Ware" Pity the poor receptionist who has to listen to that for eight hours a day.
00.37. A close up Dave Lawson's hand as he enters the code to get into the Imagine office. 5, 1, 2, then turn the top bar clockwise. People were clearly less security conscious in the olden days.
00.40. Dave Lawson and Mark Butler walk into the Image offices. Its most likely to be Sir Thomas Street.
00.47. A quick shot of programmer John Gibson (Molar Maul, Zzoom, Stonkers) sitting at his desk. He's got what looks like a Competition Pro Joystick to his right.
00.51. Ian Weatherburn, programmer of Zip-Zap and Alchemist.
00.55. A state of the art computer generated title screen names the report as:
This was most likely done on a BBC Micro. The computer was being used provide graphics for TV programmes and continuity on a regular basis by 1983; you can see a couple of examples here and here.
The picture is very similar to one that accompanied an interview with Dave Lawson in the COMPUTER & VIDEOGAMES YEARBOOK 1984 (page 10). I assumed the C&VG photo was specially commissioned for the article but it must have been a PR photo produced by Imagine.
Presumably it was easier to supply photos to magazines and newspapers and it allowed the corporate image to be better controlled. These two show Mark Butler and Dave Lawson sitting in front of the Port of Liverpool building.
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| CRASH March 1984 page 24 |
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| LIVERPOOL ECHO 15 July 1983 page 16 |
And this incredibly glossy photo was circulated round newspapers in August 1983. It ran in the WHITEHAVEN NEWS and SOUTHERN EVENING ECHO with the same text suggesting it was part of a press release[3].
01.19. Dave Lawson shows off a very elaborate box for John Gibson's game Zzoom
I didn't know if this fancy box made it as far as the shops, so I did the sensible thing and asked the good people at spectrumcomputing.co.uk. The boxes did get to the shops but are rare today. If you've got one it might fetch £25 on ebay.
02.03. Zip-Zap by Ian Weatherburn. CRASH diplomatically described this as: "By Imagine's standards, not their best game."
02.10. Ian Weatherburn is interviewed. In the background the attract screen of Zip-Zap plays a bleepy version of the Star Wars theme. Its clear Imagine Software never came to the attention of solicitors acting for George Lucas or John Williams.
02.25. John 'Grandad' Gibson is interviewed. He got his nickname because he was 36, in a company where most people were ten years younger. His bosses Mark Butler and Dave Lawson were both 23.
02.39. A reverse angle show interviewer Mike Andrews. Its the first time we get a good look at the office and it's clear this is 5 Sir Thomas Street. Imagine moved in towards the end of September 1983 and the LIVERPOOL ECHO reported:
Imagine Software has taken the whole of the newly-refurbished former cold store... Imagine has also taken the ground floor retail premises in the building. (22 September 1983 page 20)
The enormous computer sitting on John Gibson's desk is an Apple II.
03.18. Back to Ian Weatherburn. He's also got an enormous slab of a computer sitting on his desk which I think is also an Apple II with a monitor on the top. Looking back to the John Gibson interview, it's clear they moved the monitor out of the way to get a good shot of Mike Andrews.
03.40. The report moves on from Imagine. Before I do, I want to quickly try and work out when Imagine began working on Bandersnatch; the megagame which was all anyone cared after Imagine went into liquidation in July 1984.
This report predates Bandersnatch by three months of so. For Christmas 1983, John Gibson wrote a war game called Stonkers and Ian Weatherburn wrote Alchemist. They then began work on Bandersnatch supervised by Dave Lawson. The first adverts appear in the February 1984 issues of C&VG, PERSONAL COMPUTER GAMES, and YOUR COMPUTER which would all have been on sale in January 1984. CRASH issue 2, on sale from Friday 17th February, carries what I think is the first non-advert mention of Bandersnatch; a very throwaway mention:
A lot of the other programmers have been 'locked away' to work on Bandersnatch which should be ready sometime around May.
Magazine deadlines being what they were, CRASH would have visited Imagine's offices around mid-January. Bandersnatch was clearly in progress by then and the events that followed the prospective May release date were picked up by The Battle For Santa's Software.
03.52. Virgin Games catches the attention of Riverside because they are promoting their programmers like pop stars, with little biographies on the game inlay. Killer Caverns is by Daryl Bowers who went on to work on A View To A Kill and other C64 games; Corporation, Cheap Skate, North & South, and Viz: The Game. He then moved cover to console development and was credited on Alien³ (NES), Bram Stoker's Dracula (Game Boy), and Hurricanes for the SNES.
03.57. Logix is by Steve Webb. It looks like he went on to be a technical manager at Virgin, picking up credits on Strangeloop and Dan Dare.
03.57. Kieran Brennan wrote Bitmania. This appears to be his only game. The EALING AND ACTON GAZETTE carries a story about Kieran in the 01 June 1984 issue. It mentions he has just completed a "book of 21 games" for Virgin who have offered him a three year contract with the firm. Most intriguingly, it adds:
As well as a book he has also devised a computerised film sequence for a Virgin film, Electric Dreams.
I guess that would be the Pac-Man like bits in this sequence.
04.06. The person doing the captions for Riverside is having a bad day. They render Kieran Brennan as Keiran Brennon.
04.34. Kieran Brennan is being interviewed in an odd, narrow amusement arcade. It turns out he's on the Virgin Fun Bus. A converted double-decker bus which toured the country allowing people the chance to play games before they brought them. COMMODORE USER, October 1983. gave a little more information:
The bus is going on a nationwide tour soon, helped by local radio stations which will be announcing the venues over the air. Virgin hopes to make about four stops per day, coinciding with kids’ lunch breaks and school finish.
04.35. Richard Skinner counts down the top computer games. "Race, that's number six, at five it's Asteroids. Panic. That's number four" What a generic set of names.
04.39. The registration of the Fun Bus is OCR148G. According to the DVLA website, the road tax was due on 1 August 1986. Does this mean the Fun Bus is still out there somewhere? Mouldering away in a garage.
04.44. Richard Skinner continues the countdown over footage of the Fun Bus driving down the Westway in London. Cosmiads is at number three which suggests this chart is not contemporary with the early to mid-October 1983 filming. Cosmiads was a 1982 Bug-Byte game for the VIC-20, released around the end of 1982. It wouldn't be a Top 10 game at a point when the charts were topped by games like Jetpac and Manic Miner. This is only a guess but I think this chart dates back to much earlier in the year. This may be a deliberate choice made by the director to end the report showing how Imagine were flying high. It was still the glory days for Imagine when Richard Skinner recorded the chart countdown and the number two game was Wacky Waiters and at number one was Arcadia.
Do you have the Virgin Fun Bus mouldering away under a dust sheet in your garage? Have you checked? Have you checked again recently? Leave a comment or send an emails to whereweretheynow@gmail.com. Follow me on Bluesky, @shammountebank.bsky.social
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| CAMBRIDGE EVENING NEWS 24 October 1983 page 2 |
[1] TV Listing from THE GUARDIAN, Monday 24 October 1983 page 26.
[2] Preserved online are a couple of archive oddities relating to the 24 October 1983 edition of Riverside. This is from the day before, the BBC2 closedown and here is Craig Charles in an earlier incarnation as Riverside's regular punk poet.
[3] The print copies are very poor quality, this one which looks like a scan of the original, was downloaded from retrogamesmaster.co.uk
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