Yes, it's another episode of Gap in my Knowledge. See also, State Soft, Dalai, and most embarrassingly Software Creations. I was more relaxed about not knowing anything about Rage because when I checked their list of games it was mostly nineties stuff I wasn't interested in; football games and driving games. Then I had a quick look at Paul Finnegan's Mobygames page.
CEO of Special FX Software?
Sales director of Imagine Software?
Co-founder of Ocean Software?
This couldn't be correct. Could it?
It was. It turns out I've been writing about Rage Software and Paul Finnegan almost from the beginning of this blog and I never noticed. I mention him in my Ocean article, and the one about The Battle for Santa's Software, and Rage were name-checked when I was writing about Denton Designs. More than that, when I was writing about Software Creations I remember being very confused by a chunk of their history when they were acquired by a company called BCE Holdings Plc and merged with Rage Software but still remained independent (or something like that). I set it aside and never wrote it up because: A) It never seemed to effect the running of Software Creations and B) I didn't really understand it. Well, now it is time to try and understand what happened with BCE and also work out how Paul Finnegan connects a whole bunch of other companies I do know about.
The first thing to do, as always when the name Ocean comes up, is reach for OCEAN THE HISTORY by Chris Wilkins and Roger Kean; and do a quick CTRL-F on Paul Finnegan; 38 mentions.
The short version. In Liverpool around 1980, Paul Finnegan went cold calling for his printing business and met the newly arrived Tony Baden and Tony Milner of Bug-Byte. He started printing inlay cards for them and the ever increasing numbers made him realise this was a growing industry. Mark Butler and Dave Lawson left Bug-Byte to found Imagine and asked Paul to come on as their Sales Director. He did, and stayed for "six or seven months" and then left after he fell out with operations director Bruce Everiss. Meanwhile, in Manchester, David Ward and Jon Woods had founded Spectrum Games and were having trouble getting their software into the shops. They heard about Paul Finnegan's departure from Imagine and took him on. Money was tight and at the end of the first month Paul negotiated 10% equity in Spectrum Games in lieu of his salary; possibly the shrewdest bit of bargaining covered anywhere in this blog. Ocean Software was named following Paul's comment that it was confusing for a company called Spectrum Games to sell software for other computers. Then Imagine Software collapsed and Ocean took advantage of the gap in the market to grow and grow. And Paul Finnegan owned 10% of the company. Paul Finnegan appears in the BBC2 documentary The Battle for Santa's Software, watching as Jonathan Smith demonstrates Pud Pud. This puts Paul in the unique situation of working at both companies featured in the programme.
Unit 24, Edward Pavilion, Albert Dock, Liverpool, L3 4AA
Paul Finnegan sold his 10% stake and left Ocean in 1987 to set up his own company, Special F.X. Software. Negotiations were protracted because David Ward and Jon Woods were worried Paul might poach all their in house programmers, as it was he did leave along with Commodore 64 programmer Tony Pomfret and Jonathan Smith. I know where Special FX were based thanks to a picture of Jonathan Smith's business card, as a Special FX director, in OCEAN THE HISTORY.
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It was a legal condition of Paul Finnegan's departure that Ocean got a first look at every Special FX game. They decided they didn't want their first title, Hysteria, so that went to fellow Liverpool company Software Projects; where it became one of their last releases. Ocean took every subsequent game and began commissioning Special FX to work on anything they didn't have the in house resources to handle. Paul Finnegan explained to OCEAN THE HISTORY what happened next:
‘When, after a couple of years, Jon and David said we’ll take the company on and we’ll look after you going forward, it made financial sense. Except in the end they said it was too expensive and turned the tap off.'
Is he angry about the way it happened? ‘A lot of people say I should be really bitter, but I owe Jon and David a lot because they taught me a lot, and you just take it in your stride, you know. And I thought to myself that when one door closes another opens. This is a great market to be in… I’ll start again. And in 1991 I formed Rage'.
Maritime House, 47-49 Paradise Street, Liverpool, L1 3BP
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| December 2025 |
That's a very festive picture. It was late in the day and drizzling which is why the lights and reflections look so good. I took this photo at the end of a long but pleasant day walking round Liverpool with Jake Smith. We'd met up and gone exploring to track down the offices of Pygnosis and Rage Software. It took a year from him emailing me, to meeting up in person because for complicated reasons I'm only ever in Liverpool once a year.
Maritime House is gone. Swept away by the huge Liverpool One development. It would have been to the left of the three windowed brick building. Somewhere under the glass box. It was probably a business address held at the office of a firm of solicitors or accountants. The address was used all the way from the founding of Rage to 1995. Rage actually started out in the Albert Dock.
Unit 21, Edward Pavilion, Albert Dock, Liverpool, L3 4AA
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| LIVERPOOL ECHO 2 July 1992 page 45 |
Rage Software, the company that produced [Striker], was set up 15 months ago after 11 staff in the Liverpool office of Manchester-based Ocean Software were made redundant...
"There was not enough work to keep us on at Ocean, and the parting was amicable."[1] Mr Paul Finnegan said yesterday from the company's office in Bootle, Liverpool. "We pooled our money to set up Rage and sat down to identify a gap in the market."
"There was not enough work to keep us on at Ocean, and the parting was amicable."[1] Mr Paul Finnegan said yesterday from the company's office in Bootle, Liverpool. "We pooled our money to set up Rage and sat down to identify a gap in the market."
Variations on the story can be found through the nineties with the number of staff changing from nine to ten to eleven depending on how well the journalist took notes. OCEAN THE HISTORY has a different version:
In parallel, Paul Finnegan had fared well. When Ocean pulled the plug on Special FX in about 1991, he formed Rage with five programmers and artists. ‘I put the money in and I gave 70 per cent of the company away to them. That was always my philosophy, to look after them because they’re the lifeblood. If it’s going to work it’s going to be because of the programmers.’ Finnegan rejects completely the popular notion that the company was named Rage because he was so angry at the way he’d been treated. ‘No. I wanted to call it Elephant Software until they all got me round a table and gave me a good kicking. No, it was Joffa Smith who came up with Rage, just off the top of his head, short and sharp, like Crash or Zzap!; there was no malice in it. My motto is that you’ll meet those people up and down the ladder, going up and down, so stay friendly with everybody.[2]
Striker, for the Amiga, Atari ST, was released around June 1992 and the manual for the Amiga version reads:
The game STRIKER, its program code, graphic representation and artwork are the copyright of Elephant Software Limited trading as Rage Software Limited, and may not be reproduced, stored, hired or broadcast in any form whatsoever without the written permission of Elephant Software Limited. All rights are reserved worldwide.
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| LIVERPOOL ECHO Friday 31 July 1992 page17 |
I was really smug about finding that recruitment advert up the page. I thought I'd uncovered some amazing piece of secret wisdom right up to the point I realised the back of the Striker box gives a fuller version of Rage's address at the Edward Pavilion, including Unit 21. It looks like they packed up Special FX, moved three doors down and wrote Rage's first game which was then successful enough to fund a move further down the Mersey.
Trident House, 105 Derby Road, Liverpool L20 8LZ
Rage took up residence in Trident House before the end of 1992. Success followed success. The DAILY TELEGRAPH story, above, was printed the day after a front page story in the LIVERPOOL ECHO headlined "STRIKING IT RICH! Mersey Computer Game Earns £4.5m in a day". This was the SNES version of Striker, which had advance orders of 150,000. There was also a version for DOS. The SEGA Master System, Mega Drive, and Game Gear versions were called Ultimate Soccer.
Trident House is in Bootle, about two and half miles north of the central Liverpool, and about a mile north of 32 Regent Road, where Psygnosis were based from 1985 to 1988. It's an unremarkable two-story post war building. Pretty much all the area is post war because Bootle runs alongside the Liverpool docks and for it's size, it took the heaviest bombing in the country.
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I like to offer value for money so I popped round the back and took a photo there as well. Apologies for the mad Dutch angle, I was sticking my phone through a locked gate and being very careful not to drop it. This is where Jake Smith came to meet Paul Finnegan. I'd met Jake at 10am near Moorfields Station and we jumped on a train up to Bank Hall station and then made the short walk round the corner to Trident House. Later (much later, after Christmas in fact) I picked Jake's brains about how he came to meet Paul Finnegan:
I lived in Crosby north of Liverpool. It was, Crosby still is to a degree, a fishbowl everyone kind of knows each other and if you live there and you drink in the same pubs you end up knowing similar sets of people. Through friends of my dad's friends, he had talked to Paul Finnegan, and I don't know what the relationship was whether he knew him well or just in passing or having a pint with, and he ran a video games company and my dad knew I like video games.
He had this conversation with Paul and Paul said, "oh he can come in for, you know, a day if you want".
Knowing that I was going to Southport college, they were interested in talking to me from the graphic design illustration point of view. So we had a chat. I showed him some of my stuff from Southport college.
So Paul was like, this is where the future's going; Photoshop and pixel art and everything like this. You should really focus on this if you want a career in the industry. "This is how I would recommend a way to go", he says, "if you want to get your hands on some of the software we can help you with that". He was really ready to help and support in whichever way he could because ultimately, for Rage Software, that would have been a bonus to get someone onboard who could use the software.
The building itself was located Derby Road, which you and I went to look at the building. They were on the top floor of that place. The car park are the back, I think my dad dropped me off. Went upstairs and I walked in and it was an open plan office. I don't recall seeing any sort of office doors or separate office spaces. There could have been further in the back. There were distributed, sort of, not teams but clusters of people. Maybe they were working on the same software, the same game. I didn't see any screens that I remember. Don't recall seeing any bits of work on screens. It was pretty much go in, wave at everyone.
And then, you know the talk with Paul, for like the hour going through the portfolio. A bit of critiquing from him. Obviously he's a businessman running a video games company. So he was thinking about how can I employ this guy. Is he any good. Will he make me some money.
You know, he was good enough to spend the hour with me and chat away. So that was good.
1 Dacre Street, Bootle, Liverpool, Merseyside, L20 8DN
Jake's visit must have taken place in 1993, early 1994 just before Rage Software moved from Trident House to just around the corner. It's barely a four minute walk. The area is an odd mix of buildings, mostly slightly run down post-war brick buildings, interspersed with glossy new build warehouses and a few pre-war dinosaurs like the Tate Sugar Silo.
Dacre Street reminded me of Sunbeam Road where Games Workshop were based. Number 1 was surprisingly hard to locate. The one story building which I'd identified as number 1 didn't have a front door and joined up with the two-story building a bit further up the street. It turned out the whole building was number 1, which I only realised when Jake spotted the letterbox.
It's a big building. Much bigger than Trident House. Rage was flush with Striker cash and looking to expand and this new building offered room to grow, but then the company was taken over.
This is the complicated financial bit to which I've previously alluded. BCE Holdings were a Bristol-based snooker hall and arcade operator. They took over Rage in November 1994, paying £3.85 million. They also brought up Software Creations in Manchester for £9.98 million. The two companies were merged into BCE Holdings. Seeing it written down like that it looks so simple but I've spent days trying to understand what happened. I'm not sure why it baffles me so much.
I think it's because the three companies, BCE, Rage, and Software Creations, seem to spend a lot of time and money doing something which results in no obvious changes to their businesses while BCE changes beyond recognition. Software Creations and Rage both appear to carry on as individual companies. BCE Holdings changes its trading name to Rage. Paul Finnegan and Richard Kay end up being joint managing directors of the new company; until Richard Kay leaves in 1996. There's a 1999 DAILY POST profile of Paul Finnegan (03 March 1999) in which he mentions how, as managing director of BCE he:
Began tidying up by selling bits off; the arcades went, the snooker halls were sold to the management.
It seems like a lot of effort to end up with Rage Software still being Rage Software. The most common experience of takeovers is the opposite. The new owner starts throwing their weight around, the founders leave, and the company history is binned; see Ocean, Bullfrog, Gremlin, Psygnosis, Melbourne House, Us Gold, and so on. I think what foxes me is that BCE seem pretty small fry and yet they have the financial clout to take over two bigger companies. This might be the same complicated financial manoeuvre Domark used to become Eidos. A process opaquely described by Domark Founder Dominic Wheatley as:
Later, we IPOed the company by reversing into a shell called Eidos (hence the name change from Domark) on the London Stock Exchange.
That. But with BCE in place of Eidos and Software Creations and Rage Software instead of Domark. Rage became the first publicly listed games company in the UK, with Eidos following not far behind.
Unit 9. Whitehall Trading Estate, Gerrish Avenue, Whitehall, Bristol, BS5
Anyway, for the next couple of years the business address of Rage Software was a warehouse in Bristol although they never relocated from Liverpool. I don't currently have a picture of the relevant Bristol warehouse and I'm not sure I'll be in the area any time soon so you'll have to make do with this.
Still 1 Dacre Street, Bootle, Liverpool, Merseyside, L20 8DN
The other big development for Rage in 1994 was, they shifted from being a publisher to a developer. Striker had been put out under their own name but US Gold handled the 1994 game Power Drive and Rage would go on to work with Acclaim and GT Interactive. Rage had a very good relationship with GT Interactive and worked with them all the way up to their 1999 acquisition by Infogrames. After this there are a couple of Rage titles with Infogrames logos on the front, Expendable and Striker Pro 2000, but then Rage shifted back to publishing their own games.
Rage absorbed fellow Liverpool software developer Denton Designs at the end of 1995. It's not clear why but presumably Denton's were struggling and they had already worked with Rage to develop Elite Soccer [3].
Rage and Psygnosis were the big dogs in Liverpool and newspaper articles about the flourishing local software scene frequently mention both in the same breath; and where possible wrap everything up with the city's place in music history. There are two good examples at opposite ends of Rage and Psygnosis' existence. First a LIVERPOOL ECHO story about the acquisition of Rage and Sony's purchase of Psygnois with the headline "Merseybyte" (10 November 1994 page 10). Then in 2000 a GUARDIAN article with the less snappy "Mersey beats faster to the hi-tech sound" (06 June 2000 page 25).
Rage Software, and Software Creations, pushed BCE into profit in 1995 but the wheels started to wobble in 1996. BCE fell back into a loss and the following year was even worse. BCE (by now calling itself Rage Software) reported a loss of £15 million. Then the next three years were better.
Martins Building, Water Street, Liverpool, L2 3SP
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| December 2025 |
Rage moved from Bootle at the end of 1998. I thought, for a while, that the company stayed put in Dacre Street and just changed their registered address but no, they moved back down into Liverpool about half a mile from where they started at Edward Pavilion. Martins Building is right next to Liverpool Town Hall. It's in a really posh area. Water Street runs down to the Mersey between the Liver Building and the Cunard Building. It's a statement address. Rage Software was dealing direct with Sony, SEGA, and Microsoft and you don't want to take executives from those companies to Bootle. Sorry Bootle.
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| DAILY POST 03 February 1999 page 33 [4] |
Rage was playing with the big boys now. Newspaper reports would frequently list the company alongside Eidos, rather than Psygnosis who were starting to fall away. That said, it was rotten of THE INDEPENDANT to describe Rage as "Eidos's [5] little competitor" [06 August 1999 page 25] . The problem was, when Rage and Eidos were mentioned together it was often in the context of how both companies were struggling. After two thin years and three fat years, Rage Software was back in trouble. Rage shares were caught up in the inflation and bursting of the dot-com bubble. THE GUARDIAN reported:
After being marooned at around 15p for months, Rage hit a peak of 77p on March 10, taking the value of the company from around £40m to more than £200m... The fall back to below 50p is partly because all tech stocks have recently gone out of favour, but also because many small investors (20,000 of them holding 70% of the company) now think its download and Wap strategy is too high risk and are dumping stock in favour of another games company, SCi. They also think a new £6.5m share issue at 50p a share is pushing it a bit, and that a string of recent acquisitions such as Internet Football Club will not pay off for years.
(April 15 2000, page 12)
The WAP strategy was a bold, and ahead of its time deal with Orange to sell games via WAP enabled mobile phones. It had the advantage of bypassing shops, leading to potentially lower sales prices and a bigger chunk of the revenue returning to Rage. The trouble was, as management noted to THE GUARDIAN:
Investing in the internet delivery of games will wipe out the prospect of profits this year. "We are positioning ourselves for 15 to 18 months down the line," says the managing director; "We are going to make a profit, we're just not able to say how much," says the finance director.
The Internet Football Club, along with Caffeine Studios, was one of two acquisitions made earlier in the year, for £1 million in cash and 3.59 million Rage shares. Internet Football Club was basically an online game of Football Manager. You can get a glimpse of their website on the Wayback Machine.
Rage could never quite catch a break. Games didn't perform as well as expected and losses mounted. A licensing deal with David Beckham did well but not well enough to make up for disappointing sales of other titles. THE INDEPENDANT reported in March 2022 that Rage Software had a credit line of £15 million but was unable to draw on more than £4 million of it due to poor stock market conditions. Licencing deals were struck with Lamborghini and Andy McNab but these games never made it through development. Trading in Rage shares was suspended on Monday 13 January 2003. Gamespot reported:
Rage released the following statement: "The company regrets to announce that following a review by its bankers, the group's banking facilities have been discontinued." Seven minutes later Rage asked for its shares to be suspended.
The Bank of Scotland appointed Ernst & Young were as receivers on Wednesday 15 2003 and Rage Software went into administration.
Leave a comment or send an emails to whereweretheynow@gmail.com. Follow me on Bluesky, @shammountebank.bsky.social
[1] One thing which becomes clear reading OCEAN THE HISTORY and assorted newspaper stories is that Paul Finnegan is relentlessly agreeable. He appears to be the Michael Palin of the software industry.
[2] See.
[2] See.
[3] Published by Elite Systems for the Game Boy. The back of the back carries this cumbersome credit:
© 1994, Rage Software Ltd
Developed by Denton Designs Ltd.
For Elite Systems Ltd.
Licenced to Nintendo.
[4] Colin Stokes came to Rage from Ocean and before that Software Projects and Imagine. He left Imagine under amazing circumstances. Reportedly his office phone was bugged and Imagine printed in their Newsletter a whole chunk of conversations alleged to be between Colin and Imagine's competitors. If you have any copies of this newsletter please make it available online.
Developed by Denton Designs Ltd.
For Elite Systems Ltd.
Licenced to Nintendo.
[4] Colin Stokes came to Rage from Ocean and before that Software Projects and Imagine. He left Imagine under amazing circumstances. Reportedly his office phone was bugged and Imagine printed in their Newsletter a whole chunk of conversations alleged to be between Colin and Imagine's competitors. If you have any copies of this newsletter please make it available online.
[5] I disagree with THE INDEPENDANT'S use of an apostrophe there but [sic] as all the cool sub-editors say.
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