BRUCE EVERISS INTERVIEW

ONE OF IMAGINE’S KEY STAFF LOOKS BACK

Why did the company gain acclaim so quickly?

In 1982 most videogame companies were run from home on kitchen tables. Imagine Software was among the first to be a properly run, properly staffed full-time organisation. We also marketed very aggressively and in Arcadia we had a fantastic first product.

Who came up with its marketing campaigns?

Microdigital in Liverpool was one of the first computer stores, opening in mid-1978. I ran it and did all the marketing, so got to know all the press and what worked and didn't. This hard-earned expertise was transferred to Imagine.

When did you realise it was all starting to go wrong?

During the last quarter of 1983 sales were rocketing. In December we had sales of just under a million pounds for one month, which was phenomenal in those days. Then in the first quarter of 1984 sales just disappeared, as you can hear Sylvia explaining in the Commercial Breaks video. Then one day Whsmith sent back a truckload of our games and refused to pay for them, saying they had been returned as faulty. We tested them and they were perfect. In actuality, the customers had just returned the games after copying them. We tried many different tactics to try and reduce the copying, which is where the Megagames came from. From a business point of view the Megagames were just an anti-piracy solution.

What was the reason for Imagine's downfall?

The principle reason was tape-totape copying – this just suddenly became the zeitgeist and so there was very little money left in the market to pay the wages of the people who made the games. Imagine was expensive to run with large city centre offices and two lots of prior offices to be paid for, plus a bloated development workforce. Also the flow of games just wasn't sufficient and the quality of those games started to lag behind what people like Ultimate and US Gold were doing.