Imagine

Overview

When Mark Lawson and David Butler founded Imagine in 1983, they launched perhaps the UK industry's most spectacular boom-and-bust story. Within months they were churning out hit games for the ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64, had lavish offices in Liverpool, and were doing features for major newspapers as part of the explosion in computer software sales. The company invested in sales and marketing teams, made multi-lingual packaging and put its programmers in offices. Two so-called Mega Games were announced - Spectrum titles that would come with hardware add-ons to vastly expand the abilities of the platform. The announced titles Bandersnatch and Psyclapse were never released however. By mid-1984 they collapsed, citing massive debts, especially to magazines for advertising.

Butler and Lawson were key figures at Psygnosis, while the Imagine name was bought by Ocean, who mainly used it for Konami arcade conversions - Bubble Bobble and Arkanoid were notable successes - before phasing the label out in the late 80s.

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