Piracy, Imagine Software and the Megagames

March 25th, 2008 | Anecdotal musing

(The complete run of contributors' original posts as they appeared on Bruce's blog between 2008-03-25 and 2008-04-25. Bold square brackets indicate edits of his own messages by Bruce Everiss -- ie, bits in bracks were written and published by Bruce, then later silently removed from those messages. These edits have been highlighted so you can easily follow Bruce's train of thought. Contributor posts, which contributors could not alter after submission, were not edited by Bruce Everiss; they were either approved or deleted. Some posts were approved and published then deleted.)

(The posts as they appeared on Bruce's blog after the 2008-04-25 purge. Gaps indicate posts that were deleted by Bruce Everiss. Crossings-out indicate the differences between pre- and post-purge posts in the rare circumstance a message was kept. For example, the Bruce version of post 12, which starts "Stuart, you are wrong" means that this opening sentence, which Bruce earlier wrote and published, does not appear in his final edit. It isn't crossed out, it's been removed. These edits have been highlighted so you can easily follow Bruce's train of thought. Contributors' surviving posts were not edited.)

#1 rckt42 on 03.25.08 at 12:06 pm

2004?. Tape to tape?. Either you're kidding or your dates are 20 years wrong.

Sorry, but the problem was not piracy but prices from the retailers. Here in Spain, prices where dropped from 3000 pts to 875. Retailers and publishers both did a good amount of money, and piracy all but disappeared for years, until publishers got greedy again and started rising the prices (875 to 2100 in 2 years).

Keep prices down, and come down HARD on people SELLING copied games. THAT's piracy, not just copying them.

#1 rckt42 on 03.25.08 at 12:06 pm

2004?. Tape to tape?. Either you're kidding or your dates are 20 years wrong.

Sorry, but the problem was not piracy but prices from the retailers. Here in Spain, prices where dropped from 3000 pts to 875. Retailers and publishers both did a good amount of money, and piracy all but disappeared for years, until publishers got greedy again and started rising the prices (875 to 2100 in 2 years).

Keep prices down, and come down HARD on people SELLING copied games. THAT's piracy, not just copying them.

#2 Bruce on 03.25.08 at 12:15 pm

Fixed now. Thanks.

#2 Bruce on 03.25.08 at 12:15 pm

Fixed now. Thanks.

#3 Rev. Stuart Campbell on 04.11.08 at 11:55 am

Um, wasn't the problem that you pissed away fortunes on sports cars and motorbikes, and making shedloads of terrible, terrible games like Pedro and Cosmic Cruiser that nobody wanted to buy, trying to pull expensive and ill-thought-out stunts like buying up entire tape-duplication plant capacities so nobody else could get their games produced for Christmas, and wasting all your money on trying to make ludicrous overblown "epics" 20 years too early that would turn out crap anyway?

Or is it just some weird and inexplicable quirk of fate that the companies who made good games, that didn't need a ton of extra hardware bolted onto the computer to run, and didn't buy Ferraris - Ocean, Ultimate, whoever - didn't go bust, despite presumably being pirated at least as much as Imagine? (And probably more so, since their games were much better.)

#4 Bruce on 04.11.08 at 11:59 am

In a word. No.

#5 Rev. Stuart Campbell on 04.11.08 at 12:13 pm

Really? So all those other companies got pirated less than Imagine? All that money wasted blocking up the tape plant *wasn't* just a gargantuan misjudgement? You *really* thought there was a viable market for 50-quid Spectrum games?

#6 Lloyd Mangram on 04.11.08 at 12:19 pm

"Game piracy ended up hitting them too with one magazine publisher, Newsfield in Ludlow, eventually going out of business."

Er, what the hell did that have to do with games piracy? Quick answer: nothing at all.

#7 Bruce on 04.11.08 at 12:32 pm

Stuart, lots of game companies went bump. If you watch these videos you will see that Ocean were equally impacted by piracy: http://bruceongames.com/2008/02/04/commercial-breaks/
Imagine was most exposed because it had expanded fastest on the smallest capital base.
Also they had stupidly high expenses because they were in prime city centre offices and had moved twice. So they were paying rent on three lots of premises, two of which were empty.

I was there. I was a member of the board of directors and I was involved in all the processes in the article. So I have a far better idea of what actually happened than people who just read about it.

#8 Bruce on 04.11.08 at 12:34 pm

Lloyd, piracy massively reduced the revenue that game companies received. Therefore they reduced their advertising spend significantly. So magazine publishers had a lot less income.

#9 Lloyd Mangram on 04.11.08 at 12:45 pm

What I take exception to is you implying that Newsfield went under due to piracy, which is clearly absolute poppycock. Newsfield's eventual bankruptcy was the result of ill-advised tinkering with its key magazines, and misguided attempts to break into new markets (not least with the ludicrously expensive LM, aimed at a market that wouldn't exist for years—rather like the magazine equivalent of Bandersnatch), not because of those scallywags copying games. In fact, one could easily argue that the likes of Crash and Zzap!64 in some ways actually benefited from piracy, since more kids got into games, and the circulation figures rose accordingly.

#10 Ian Osborne on 04.11.08 at 12:57 pm

Not to mention Newsfield's bizarre reluctance to release single-format magazines for the up-and-coming 16-bit computers, the Amiga and the Atari ST.

#11 Rev. Stuart Campbell on 04.11.08 at 12:57 pm

"Also they had stupidly high expenses because they were in prime city centre offices and had moved twice. So they were paying rent on three lots of premises, two of which were empty."

Right. So going bust was about piracy, and nothing to do with renting hideously expensive empty offices? Or the tape plant fiasco, or the Marshall Cavendish deal, or rotten games that nobody would have bought?

(Seriously, if the Speccy had been 100% piracy-proof you'd still have struggled to shift three copies of Cosmic Cruiser, and I don't need to have been a director to know that.)

Yes, other companies went bust too. But most of them for the same core reason as Imagine - their games were rubbish and nobody wanted them at any price.

The games industry has whined that "piracy is killing us" for the last 30 years. So how come it isn't dead yet? How can it be that, in fact, it's about 100 times the size, even though piracy is easier and more widespread than ever thanks to the internet and BitTorrent?

The answer is the same as it's always been - if you make games that people want to buy, they'll give you money. If you churn out crap and run your business badly, you'll go bust. And Imagine was, by its own admission, thoroughly guilty on both counts. It's embarrassing to see an industry figure so senior and supposedly wise still trying 25 years later to blame it all on little kids in playgrounds.

#12 Bruce on 04.11.08 at 1:08 pm

Stuart, you are wrong. Look at this list to see just how many companies were wiped out: http://worldofspectrum.org/games/index.html

Piracy put the games industry in the doldrums for ages. Budget games that were not worth copying ruled. It was only with the introduction of copy proof game cartridge consoles (which did what Imagine had tried to do) that the industry took off again. Because once more there was a viable business model.

#12 Bruce on 04.11.08 at 1:08 pm

Stuart, you are wrong. Look at this list to see just how many companies were wiped out: http://worldofspectrum.org/games/index.html

Piracy put the games industry in the doldrums for ages. Budget games that were not worth copying ruled. It was only with the introduction of copy proof game cartridge consoles (which did what Imagine had tried to do) that the industry took off again. Because once more there was a viable business model.

#13 Peter St. John on 04.11.08 at 1:10 pm

Piracy put the games industry in the doldrums for ages.

So many copies of Robocop did Ocean sell again?

#14 Bruce on 04.11.08 at 1:22 pm

Robocop was laden with all sorts of anti piracy protection including, with Robocop 3, a dongle!! Doing exactly what Imagine had been trying to do.

#15 Peter St. John on 04.11.08 at 1:24 pm

Bruce, it had Speedlock on it. Which was hacked about five seconds after it left the duplicators. Plus, you could tape it to a C90 easily. Yet it was still one of the biggest selling games on the Spectrum...

#16 Ian Osborne on 04.11.08 at 1:25 pm

If I recall correctly, the Robocop 3 dongle was beaten before the game's official release too.

#17 Rev. Stuart Campbell on 04.11.08 at 1:29 pm

Bruce, you're talking complete cobblers and you know it. The documentary you're so keen to link to points out why times got harder in 1984:

"It's slowed down dramatically in the last three months... probably because there are a lot more software houses now producing goods than there were this time last year." - Imagine sales manager Sylvia Jones

Any chump can make money in the early days of a format, simply by getting product on shelves when people have nothing else to buy. But soon, other publishers flood onto the scene in pursuit of the easy money, and then the wheat is sorted from the chaff. You need good games and business skills to stay in profit against vastly increased competition, and Imagine had... Pedro and Cosmic Cruiser, and huge empty offices and fortunes being paid to tape plants to sit around doing nothing.

You keep ignoring all the facts that prove your argument is utter rubbish.

- The Speccy, despite being apparently crippled by piracy just 18 months into its life, survived as a High Street format for another seven years, longer than the SNES or the Mega Drive or the Amiga.

- despite a 30-year assault on the industry by the evil pirates, the industry has grown and grown and grown with every passing year, and now generates billions and billions of dollars. If piracy is killing games, it's doing an incredibly bad job.

- Ocean, which you yourself claim was "equally impacted by piracy" as Imagine, was still around and trading successfully a decade later. Other peers like Ultimate went on to become Rare and be bought by Microsoft for a quarter of a billion pounds. The only differences between them and Imagine were that they made better games and ran their companies more competently.

Elsewhere on your blog (http://bruceongames.com/2008/02/04/how-to-pirate-microsoft-xbox-360-games/) you tell us that pretty much every format on the market today is riddled with piracy - Xbox 360, PC, DS, PSP, the lot. One would imagine, then, that those formats would all be failing disastrously, and nobody was making any money on them. Whoops. Or are you telling us that the billions of pounds flowing into the games industry in 2008 - this week's MCV puts the software-market value for the UK ALONE at GBP107m for the last three weeks - is all coming from the PS3? Because I'm sure we'd all enjoy a chuckle.

GBP107m in three weeks, at the deadest time of the year, in the UK alone. Multiply that very roughly by 10 for the world market, then (conservatively) by 20 for a whole year, and you get GBP20 BILLION a year, on software alone, despite all the major formats being "killed" by piracy. The pirates really need to hire some better hitmen, wouldn't you say?

#18 Oddbob on 04.11.08 at 1:32 pm

I'm not entirely sure what this level of revisionism is supposed to achieve Bruce... I assume these pieces from The Fall Of Imagine article aren't gross misquotes?

"There were two main problems with Imagine," comments Everiss. "Firstly, the cost base became too high, too many staff and very expensive office accomodation. Secondly, development stopped producing product to sell, they expected the existing catalogue to sell for ever." ...

...In the meantime Everiss was fighting to pilot a ruddlerless ship. It was only towards the end that he became aware of the extent of the problem. "I'm not a signatory on the bank or anything," he said at the time, "but I've had a look at the financial records of the company and there has never been a VAT return, never a bank concillation, never a creditor's ledger control account, never any budgeting, never any cash-flow forecasting, no cost centres, not even an invoice authorisation procedure. Just no financial controls at all."

They seem to point clearly towards the fact that it wasn't piracy that was responsible for the demise of Imagine, but incredible folly. What changed in the 24 intervening years between the collapse of Imagine and today to warrant such massive levels of backtracking and misrepresentation of the facts?

#19 Bruce on 04.11.08 at 1:33 pm

Trying to pretend that piracy is a victimless crime is patently absurd. Just look at the way that bit torrent has dramatically reduced the number of boxed PC games now developed.
It has had the same effect on PSP where game software sales are a tiny fraction of what they would otherwise be.

Sinclair Spectrum game sales collapsed when tape to tape copying was "discovered". This really hammered the game development and publishing industry who tried everything they could to prevent it. Budget games was the only solution that worked until the consoles came along.

It was piracy that destroyed Imagine. Sure if we had all ridden bicycles and worked out of a tent we may have survived a little longer. But basically our income collapsed.

#19 Bruce on 04.11.08 at 1:33 pm

Trying to pretend that piracy is a victimless crime is patently absurd. Just look at the way that bit torrent has dramatically reduced the number of boxed PC games now developed.
It has had the same effect on PSP where game software sales are a tiny fraction of what they would otherwise be.

Sinclair Spectrum game sales collapsed when tape to tape copying was "discovered". This really hammered the game development and publishing industry who tried everything they could to prevent it. Budget games was the only solution that worked until the consoles came along.

It was piracy that destroyed Imagine. Sure if we had all ridden bicycles and worked out of a tent we may have survived a little longer. But basically our income collapsed.

#20 Rev. Stuart Campbell on 04.11.08 at 1:36 pm

"It was piracy that destroyed Imagine. Sure if we had all ridden bicycles and worked out of a tent we may have survived a little longer."

Or made some good games, or only rented one big city-centre office instead of three. Or not sent people out to tell absurd lies to distributors - "Bandersnatch will have 25 things in the box, cost 40 quid and be out in six weeks". At the time Jones was telling those lies, even if Imagine hadn't gone down the toilet the game was months, probably years away.

Is the games industry dead, Bruce? Or does it get bigger every year, despite the fact that piracy gets easier and more widespread every year?

It's a pretty simple question.

#21 Rev. Stuart Campbell on 04.11.08 at 1:38 pm

And when did anyone say "piracy is a victimless crime"? Nobody on here. Are you so desperate to shore up your position that you've resorted to refuting arguments nobody made? It seems so. As Oddbob notes, you condemned your future self out of your own mouth - Imagine was staggeringly badly run, and created no new games anyone wanted. That's why it went bust, and so many of its peers carried on successfully for years and decades.

#22 Peter St. John on 04.11.08 at 1:40 pm

Sinclair Spectrum game sales collapsed when tape to tape copying was "discovered".

Again, Robocop and the Ocean-Imagine era of 1987-91 do contradict you on this point...

#23 Bruce on 04.11.08 at 1:42 pm

Oddbob, the high cost base just accelerated Imagine's demise. The lack of new product was largely down to the concentration of resources on the megagames.

There is no revisionism. It is a matter of record that we tried to drop retail prices, that we wrote to all the magazines, that we went to 5 colour inlay cards. Why would we be putting our effort into doing all these things if it weren't that we were being very badly affected by piracy?

As I said earlier I was there as a board director and was involved in the decisions. I know exactly what happened and it is in that article.

#23 Bruce on 04.11.08 at 1:42 pm

Oddbob, the high cost base just accelerated Imagine's demise. The high cost base just accelerated Imagine's demise. The lack of new product was largely down to the concentration of resources on the megagames.

There is no revisionism. It is a matter of record that we tried to drop retail prices, that we wrote to all the magazines, that we went to 5 colour inlay cards. Why would we be putting our effort into doing all these things if it weren't that we were being very badly affected by piracy?

As I said earlier I was there as a board director and was involved in the decisions. I know exactly what happened and it is in that article.

#24 Rev. Stuart Campbell on 04.11.08 at 1:45 pm

"It is a matter of record that we tried to drop retail prices, that we wrote to all the magazines, that we went to 5 colour inlay cards. Why would we be putting our effort into doing all these things if it weren't that we were being very badly affected by piracy?"

Perhaps you'd have been better directing your efforts less at writing letters to Crash and making colourful inlay cards, and more at making some good games and sorting out the ongoing catastrophe that was - by YOUR OWN account - the state of the company's financial management?

It's odd that you were happy to acknowledge the company's many enormous failings at the time, but now want to blame it all on a nebulous bogeyman.

#25 Ian Osborne on 04.11.08 at 1:50 pm

It sounds to me like Imagine's problem was too-rapid expansion, and too little consolidation. The accounting problems outlined by Bruce, as quoted by Oddbob, seem to point to a mid-sized business being run like a back-bedroom operation.

#26 Bruce on 04.11.08 at 1:56 pm

Stuart you really have no idea what you are talking about. As I have said repeatedly, I was there. You only have, at best, third hand accounts.
If Ian Hetherington, David Lawson and Mark Butler all said that my article was rubbish then I might have a think about it.
Meanwhile it is the most accurate account of the demise of Imagine yet written.

#27 Rev. Stuart Campbell on 04.11.08 at 1:59 pm

"The lack of new product was largely down to the concentration of resources on the megagames."

So you had nothing to sell because you were devoting all your time and money (that which wasn't being wasted on fast cars and empty offices and idle tape plants, at least) on absurd fantasy projects that didn't have one chance in a thousand of ever coming to fruition. You were relying on continuing sales of Ah Diddums and BC Bill funding the entire bloated, insanely-wasteful company for the months and years it would have taken to get Psyclapse and Bandersnatch finished, and then hoping that Speccy owners would fork out GBP40-GBP50 on a single game.

That's an accurate statement of Imagine's business plan for 1984-86, yes?

#27 Rev. Stuart Campbell on 04.11.08 at 1:59 pm

"The lack of new product was largely down to the concentration of resources on the megagames."

So you had nothing to sell because you were devoting all your time and money (that which wasn't being wasted on fast cars and empty offices and idle tape plants, at least) on absurd fantasy projects that didn't have one chance in a thousand of ever coming to fruition. You were relying on continuing sales of Ah Diddums and BC Bill funding the entire bloated, insanely-wasteful company for the months and years it would have taken to get Psyclapse and Bandersnatch finished, and then hoping that Speccy owners would fork out GBP40-GBP50 on a single game.

That's an accurate statement of Imagine's business plan for 1984-86, yes?

#28 Ian Osborne on 04.11.08 at 2:00 pm

Bruce, could you address some of Stu's points about Imagine, like its running three city-centre offices and leaving two of them empty, paying to keep a duplication plant idle to prevent your competition releasing games for Christmas and talking up a product you claimed was going to have 25 things in the box and cost GBP40? Are these fair?

#29 Bruce on 04.11.08 at 2:10 pm

There was no idle tape plant.
Just shows how completely misinformed you are.
All we did is book our duplication early so as not to miss out on the then limited capacity.

Also I don't understand your obsession with cars. Once again you are just regurgitating what you have read. We only bought secondhand cars and they were on hire purchase. The monthly running costs including finance payments were not dissimilar to running a Ford Granada. In fact at the time probably cheaper because of the lack of depreciation.

And if you continue to be offensive I will delete your posts.

#29 Bruce on 04.11.08 at 2:10 pm

There was no idle tape plant.
Just shows how completely misinformed you are.
All we did is book our duplication early so as not to miss out on the then limited capacity.

Also I don't understand your obsession with cars. Once again you are just regurgitating what you have read. We only bought secondhand cars and they were on hire purchase. The monthly running costs including finance payments were not dissimilar to running a Ford Granada. In fact at the time probably cheaper because of the lack of depreciation.

And if you continue to be offensive I will delete your posts.

#30 Peter St. John on 04.11.08 at 2:12 pm

Bruce, the tape plant was indeed not idle, but the report in Crash 12 implies that you duplicated vast swathes of your games to prevent others from doing so with theirs, and then the resulting flood of Imagine games after Christmas left you with huge amounts of stock you couldn't sell. Is this correct?

#31 Rev. Stuart Campbell on 04.11.08 at 2:24 pm

Offensive? All I'm looking for are some honest answers.

1. After 30 years of being "killed" by piracy, do you consider the GBP20bn-a-year videogames industry to be dead?

2. If not, how many more years of being killed will it take? You keep predicting that "eventually" piracy will stop the development of new games - since we're still on what looks a lot like a growth curve, when in your opinion will this event take place?

3. Do you consider that Imagine was prudently run, in terms of its finances?

4. Do you consider that games like Pedro and Cosmic Cruiser were of sufficiently high quality to compete profitably in the 1984 Spectrum market had there been no piracy? (World Of Spectrum shows over 1,000 commercial Speccy game releases in that year, including the likes of Jet Set Willy, Trashman, Beach Head, Technician Ted, Boulder Dash, Chuckie Egg, Pyjamarama, Sabre Wulf, Tornado Low Level, Tir Na Nog and many more classics.)

5. If piracy was to blame, why didn't you say so at the time instead of attributing Imagine's crash to bad management and bad planning?

Simple, polite questions that you keep dodging. Come on, Bruce, let's have some proper answers.

#32 Bruce on 04.11.08 at 2:27 pm

Peter, what happened is that we largely sold the stock. However much of it was returned to us a faulty by the retailers who then refused to pay us. When we tested the games they were perfect, the retailers had refunded the customers without question. And of course the customers were returning the games because they had made copies.

Once tape copying took off loads of people took their game collections back for refund. Stores like W H Smith had a no quibble policy and gave them their money but then didn't pay us.

So piracy wasn't just not selling any new stock. It was not being paid for stock that had previously been legitimately sold.

I remember the huge mountain of games that came back from W H Smith, the largest retailer in those days.

#32 Bruce on 04.11.08 at 2:27 pm

Peter, what happened is that we largely sold the stock. What happened is that we largely sold the stock. However much of it was returned to us a faulty by the retailers who then refused to pay us. When we tested the games they were perfect, the retailers had refunded the customers without question. And of course the customers were returning the games because they had made copies.

Once tape copying took off loads of people took their game collections back for refund. Stores like W H Smith had a no quibble policy and gave them their money but then didn't pay us.

So piracy wasn't just not selling any new stock. It was not being paid for stock that had previously been legitimately sold.

I remember the huge mountain of games that came back from W H Smith, the largest retailer in those days.

#33 Rev. Stuart Campbell on 04.11.08 at 2:28 pm

6. What is your honest opinion of the timescale that Psyclapse and Bandersnatch would have been released on, if ever?

7. What do you believe was their likely selling price in the event of release?

8. Do you believe that Imagine could realistically have covered its costs, and existing debts, until such a time by selling only its back catalogue, given that you've told us the company's resources were being devoted to those two titles at the expense of any other new games?

9. How accurate were your own statements at the time, in the Crash interview and the BBC documentary?

#34 Ian Osborne on 04.11.08 at 2:30 pm

"I remember the huge mountain of games that came back from W H Smith, the largest retailer in those days."

I sympathise, but this must've been happening to other games companies too. Why did Imagine go to the wall when so many others didn't?

#35 Peter St. John on 04.11.08 at 2:33 pm

Hmm, I'm suspicious, especially given this, also from Crash 12:

This was a principal reason behind the strange move to lower the price of Imagine software. It also backfired because they had flooded the shops with non-selling tapes, and then expected everyone to like the fact that the tapes would have to be sold at a price lower than the wholesale price the shopkeepers had bought the tapes for in the first place.

You may have just been on the receiving end of a revolt rather than widespread piracy. And again, why didn't this affect Ocean, Domark, Elite, US Gold and Gremlin to a similar level?

(personally, I think that if you hadn't decided to develop a risky system that would cost twice your profits in 1983 with no real idea of the demand for the megagames, you would have been around for a fair few years, piracy notwithstanding...)

#36 Bruce on 04.11.08 at 2:35 pm

[Stuart you are being disingenuous.]
1) The game industry only succeeds when it has pirate proof product. If people can get games for free then they will. Hence the demise of boxed PC games when bit torrents came along. This is irrefutable and you are in denial continuing to try to imply that piracy is victimless.

2) There is a continuous war between the pirated and the publishers. The ultimate solution is server based games. This is probably where most gaming will be.

3) Imagine was run sensibly, not prudently. For most of it's life it had rapidly increasing turnover and income in excess of it's outgoings. When the income suddenly stopped due to piracy we were in trouble.

4) Game quality is subjective. We published games, people bought them. Some games we published were, very obviously, better than others.

5) We did. I refer you once again to the letter that we sent to every magazine.

#37 Rev. Stuart Campbell on 04.11.08 at 2:36 pm

10. How accurate is this account of events at the time of the collapse?

http://nvg.ntnu.no... imagine_crash0185.htm

#38 Rev. Stuart Campbell on 04.11.08 at 2:38 pm

So "I've had a look at the financial records of the company and there has never been a VAT return, never a bank concillation, never a creditor's ledger control account, never any budgeting, never any cash-flow forecasting, no cost centres, not even an invoice authorisation procedure. Just no financial controls at all," is your idea of being run "sensibly"?

Wow.

#39 Rev. Stuart Campbell on 04.11.08 at 2:41 pm

"The game industry only succeeds when it has pirate proof product... This is irrefutable and you are in denial continuing to try to imply that piracy is victimless."

Bruce, if you think the games industry is not currently "successful" then you appear to be the one in denial. Every format currently available is easily pirateable, and yet game software still sells to the tune of GBP20bn a year. Man, I'd love to fail that badly.

#40 Bruce on 04.11.08 at 2:45 pm

Stuart, Firstly it was piracy that led to the demise of Imagine. Without piracy it would probably still be here, there were some good people in the company who have gone on to have successful careers in the industry.

The situation at Imagine was worse than at the other publishers:
1) Because we were the biggest, so the most exposed.
2) We had expanded very quickly on a small capital base.
3) Our overhead base was large. We had a larger workforce than any other publisher and we had expensive premises.
4) What financial resources we had were going into the megagames.
5) Our development talent was going mainly into the megagames.

1) to 5) are not the reason for the demise of Imagine. They are merely factors that made the piracy bite harder.

As I have said repeatedly I was there at the highest level in the company. You, most definitely, were not. Yet you persist in thinking that you know better than me what happened.

#40 Bruce on 04.11.08 at 2:45 pm

Stuart, Firstly it was piracy that led to the demise of Imagine. Firstly it was piracy that led to the demise of Imagine. Without piracy it would probably still be here, there were some good people in the company who have gone on to have successful careers in the industry.

The situation at Imagine was worse than at the other publishers:
1) Because we were the biggest, so the most exposed.
2) We had expanded very quickly on a small capital base.
3) Our overhead base was large. We had a larger workforce than any other publisher and we had expensive premises.
4) What financial resources we had were going into the megagames.
5) Our development talent was going mainly into the megagames.

1) to 5) are not the reason for the demise of Imagine. They are merely factors that made the piracy bite harder.

As I have said repeatedly I was there at the highest level in the company. You, most definitely, were not. Yet you persist in thinking that you know better than me what happened.

#41 Bruce on 04.11.08 at 2:50 pm

Stuart you obviously know little about games. When a format is piratable at massive inconvenience to the pirate then the incidence of piracy is low. As now on PS3, Wii and 360.

It is when piracy is so easy that any idiot can do it that we have the problem. As in 8 bit tape to tape, PSX disk burning and PC bit torrents. All three of these have decimated sales and damaged the industry.

#41 Bruce on 04.11.08 at 2:50 pm

Stuart you obviously know little about games. When a format is piratable at massive inconvenience to the pirate then the incidence of piracy is low. As now on PS3, Wii and 360.

It is when piracy is so easy that any idiot can do it that we have the problem. As in 8 bit tape to tape, PSX disk burning and PC bit torrents. All three of these have decimated sales and damaged the industry.

#42 Rev. Stuart Campbell on 04.11.08 at 2:50 pm

No, Bruce - as I've said, I persist in believing what you said at the time. Namely, that the company was quite stupefyingly badly run, had no financial planning, was spending all its money on games which would never come out, and had nothing of even remotely acceptable quality to sell in the meantime.

And why wouldn't I believe those things? After all, you were there, and you should know.

#43 Ian Osborne on 04.11.08 at 2:50 pm

According to the Crash article, Psylapse was advertised in the press and expensive box art was commissioned at a time when it still only existed on paper. Is this true?

#44 Rev. Stuart Campbell on 04.11.08 at 2:52 pm

"It is when piracy is so easy that any idiot can do it that we have the problem."

Ah, right. That would explain the massive failure of the DS, and the Playstation before it, and the Spectrum before that.

#45 Rev. Stuart Campbell on 04.11.08 at 2:53 pm

Incidentally, I've just seen the weather forecast on telly, and it's going to rain later this afternoon. Apparently piracy is to blame.

#46 Ian Osborne on 04.11.08 at 2:55 pm

Does anyone still have the liquidators' report from Imagine? This would offer an excellent independent assessment of what went wrong, carried out by impartial professionals.

#47 Bruce on 04.11.08 at 2:55 pm

Stuart, just because the book keeping was not what it should have been does not mean that other departments had the same problem.

Ian, it is standard practice to create the marketing material and advertise a game to create a demand. If publishers waited till a game was finished before they did this there would be no industry.

I am answering no more here. I have better things to do with my time. What is in that article is an accurate account of events at the time. From the position of someone who was actually there.

#48 John on 04.11.08 at 2:58 pm

The DS, the most easily pirated format of them all, is currently outselling just about everything, probably including bread. I'm a bit confused by that.

What's fun here is it's an argument between 1984 Bruce, and 2008 Bruce.

2008 Bruce, while we all know that liking a game is subjective, we also know that far fewer people like really rubbish games, than those that like really good games. So, considering this, do you think if Imagine had been releasing really good games they would have better survived the brutal attacks of the mighty pirates?

#49 Rev. Stuart Campbell on 04.11.08 at 2:59 pm

"I am answering no more here."

Yeah, the ground under your argument IS getting a little sticky, isn't it? You can repeat "piracy is what killed Imagine" as many times as you like, but it won't make it any more true.

It didn't kill any of the other big Speccy companies. It didn't kill the Speccy itself, or its magazines. It hasn't killed the games industry as a whole, which has enjoyed absolutely spectacular growth and is now bigger than music and movies and Communism and everything. Piracy has always been with us, is with us now, and will always be with us. Other publishers manage to do very well despite it. Imagine was disastrously badly run and had no marketable product, and therefore collapsed. That's not piracy, that's business. The end.

#50 Dudley on 04.11.08 at 3:48 pm

"All three of these have decimated sales and damaged the industry."

So all of this is over a 10% fall in sales?

#51 Rev. Stuart Campbell on 04.11.08 at 3:50 pm

"Stuart you obviously know little about games. When a format is piratable at massive inconvenience to the pirate then the incidence of piracy is low. As now on PS3, Wii and 360."

Conveniently, MCV have just published the UK sales figures for March. Let's have a look at how sales are doing when measured against ease of piracy:

FULL PRICE SOFTWARE BY FORMAT
------------------------
360 (fairly easy to pirate) - 23.1%
Wii (quite hard to pirate) - 18.5%
PC (very very easy) - 17.1%
DS (very very easy) - 16.7%
PS3 (pretty hard) - 16.4%
PSP (definitely the hardest) - 4.2%

BUDGET PRICE BY FORMAT
------------------

DS (easy) - 30.6%
PC (easy) - 21%
Wii (medium) - 16.7%
PS2 (medium) - 12.3%
PSP (hard) - 7.3%
360 (hard) - 6.2%

Well, that's odd. By and large, it's the vastly-easiest-to-pirate DS and PC (requiring no hardware or firmware modifications whatsoever) that are selling the most games, and the much-more-difficult-to-pirate PSP (which requires all sorts of specialised peripherals and scary messing with the firmware) is trailing in last, miles behind everything else. How very strange.

Bruce? Bruce?

Oh, you've gone.

#52 Rev. Stuart Campbell on 04.11.08 at 3:59 pm

NUMBER OF FORMAT-EXCLUSIVE GAMES IN ALL-FORMATS TOP 50, MARCH 2008:

DS: 8 (positions 3, 13, 15, 23, 25, 28, 36, 47, 49)
Wii: 4 (positions 9, 14, 17, 40)
360: 2 (positions 18, 48)
PS3: 2 (positions 5, 46)
PC: 1 (position 22)

Another savage beating for the easy-to-pirate DS at the hands of those evil software thieves, there.

#53 Bruce on 04.11.08 at 4:10 pm

[Stuart, you obviously know little about games. You are spending too much time as a keyboard warrior.]

The PSP is not definitely the hardest to pirate. You just download the bit torrent onto a memory card. This is why PSP games sell so badly. You are just plain wrong. Again.

The DS isn't very, very easy because you have to go out and buy a special copying attachment and most owners haven't got this yet. Once again you are wrong.

[All this is covered in earlier articles on this blog, which I suggest that you read. Then you might learn something about the game industry.]

#54 Ian Osborne on 04.11.08 at 4:15 pm

Hold on, surely the PSP and the DS are much of a muchness in the piracy stakes, both requiring the purchase of a dubious peripheral that isn't available in the shops?

Also, Bruce, do you have a copy of the liquidators' report? That should settle the argument for once and for all.

#55 Rev. Stuart Campbell on 04.11.08 at 4:27 pm

"Stuart, you obviously know little about games. You are spending too much time as a keyboard warrior.

The PSP is not definitely the hardest to pirate. You just download the bit torrent onto a memory card. This is why PSP games sell so badly. You are just plain wrong. Again."

Bruce: a PSP will NOT run "bit torrents" from a memory card unless it has first been modified with custom firmware. In order to do this, you must first procure a specialised "Pandora" battery, and use it in conjunction with software on a specially-modified memory stick in order to flash the custom firmware. This is an extremely daunting task for anyone not already well-versed in hacking, and runs the risk of "bricking" the PSP, rendering it unable to play any games, pirated or otherwise. I'm afraid you're the one who is "plain wrong" on this matter.

As for my knowing "little about games" - you're aware that I've been a professional videogames journalist for almost 20 years, and was also Development Manager at Sensible Software during their most successful period in the mid-90s, yes? All you have to do to discover said fact is click on my name on any of my comments.

Because, y'know, otherwise you might look a bit silly.

#56 Rev. Stuart Campbell on 04.11.08 at 4:30 pm

Ian: as you know, the R4 DS "flash cart" is easily available from those sinister semi-legal pirate-enablers at Amazon.co.uk. And it requires no modification to the DS hardware or firmware, needing simply to be plugged in, unlike PSP modding which is far more complex and convoluted. (After the modification is performed the two are equally easy, but that's a very big "after".)

#57 Jonny on 04.11.08 at 4:31 pm

My mother pirates games on her DS. It's not a difficult task by any means.

#57 Jonny on 04.11.08 at 4:31 pm

My mother pirates games on her DS. It's not a difficult task by any means.

#58 Bruce on 04.11.08 at 4:40 pm

The PSP doesn't require any dubious peripheral. Just a standard Sony card writer/reader on your PC. I have one that accepts lots of different memory cards.

PSP owners very widely use their machines as media players. They download all sorts of content as bit torrents. Films especially. So downloading games has been very common for PSP owners for some time. Hence the very poor sales of PSP games.

The demographic of DS owners is a lot less techie. Brain training etc saw to that. So they are vastly less likely to pirate. And you do need to buy a deicated piracy device to do it. Also these devices have only been commonly available relatively recently so their full impact is yet to be felt.

And Stuart's format exclusive games list supports what I have said.

That now is really enough from me.

The liquidators report, which I haven't seen, will presumably say that income stopped and outgoings continued.

#59 Rev. Stuart Campbell on 04.11.08 at 4:48 pm

Bruce, you're becoming delusional. An unmodded PSP will run movie files, which are unprotected, but it will NOT run pirated PSP games. To do so requires a complex technical process and specialised hardware in the shape of the "Pandora" or "Jigkick" battery.

Your comments on the levels of DS piracy, and the availability of pirating devices for it, are so ill-informed and spectacularly wrong as to be laughable, and merit no retort, because it's becoming apparent that you don't have the slightest idea what you're talking about.

#60 Captain JMac on 04.11.08 at 5:13 pm

I'd just like to pop in and say that I very much enjoyed reading this thread.

#60 Captain JMac on 04.11.08 at 5:13 pm

I'd just like to pop in and say that I very much enjoyed reading this thread.

#61 Matt on 04.11.08 at 6:31 pm

Hacking a fat PSP doesn't need a Pandora battery - the earlier firmwares were pretty easy to mod once people starting making the n00b-proof programs. After the later firmwares it was a little more tricky but I'd imagine the majority of PSPs are easily hackable.

#61 Matt on 04.11.08 at 6:31 pm

Hacking a fat PSP doesn't need a Pandora battery - the earlier firmwares were pretty easy to mod once people starting making the n00b-proof programs. After the later firmwares it was a little more tricky but I'd imagine the majority of PSPs are easily hackable.

#62 Peter Perpendicularly on 04.11.08 at 7:01 pm

Interestingly, there was a Speccy megagame of exactly the type Mr Everiss describes: it came out at Christmas 1985 with a dongle that looked like a joystick interface and included a 16K ROM to support the 64K-only game and provide built-in tape alignment testing, plus a joystick socket.

The dongle took over the Speccy and booted the main game from tape as an extremely fast headerless loader. You didn't have to bother with tape-to-tape to copy the game; you could freely back it up to tape or Microdrive from the options screen, because even if you could duplicate the file it was useless without the other bits of the game in the dongle ROM.

The game, a complicated fantasy thing, also packed extras in the striking box such as a glossy map and a specially commissioned novel that supplied important clues.

In practical terms, the only difference between this megagame and the Imagine model was that the game sold for GBP15, not GBP30 or GBP40.

The game was Shadow of the Unicorn by much-loved veteran software house Mikrogen, who'd seen huge success with their Wally Week games such as Everyone's a Wally and Automania (which, incidentally, was the first Speccy game with an anti-piracy fast loader. It was famously unreliable). The dongle even had a special name, the Mikro-Plus. Given the tech of the time, a Mikro-Plus game was literally unpirateable. Shadow of the Unicorn was to be the first of a series of megagames from the company; already underway were popular cartoon licence Battle of the Planets and hotly anticipated Wally sequel Three Weeks in Paradise.

http://crashonline.org.uk/19/mkplus.htm

Shadow of the Unicorn destroyed Mikrogen. Utterly destroyed them. Because nobody bought the game, because it was a rubbish cross between a terrible, terrible Lords of Midnight rip-off and a terrible, terrible Tir Na Nog clone (both of which games, obviously, had come out earlier without the need for special hardware). According to Crash, the company sank at least GBP130,000 into the dongle, ordering an initial 25,000 units: http://crashonline.org.uk/20/unicorn.htm . According to Sinclair User, they needed to sell 40,000 to break even, but only managed about a quarter of that by selling copies to me and 10,999 other idiots: http://sincuser.f9.co.uk/046/news.htm . The catastrophe caused the breakup of the vintage publisher's original team and the company lost both an MD and a founding programmer.

Mikrogen struggled along for another 18 months. Strangely enough, both Battle of the Planets and Three Weeks in Paradise were rushed out as normal, non-Plus games, apparently losing nothing at all in the conversion. (To be fair, there was a slightly bigger Three Weeks for the Speccy 128K, but there's no info on whether that was the original Mikro-Plus version undongled or the 48K game with a section added later to qualify as a 128K full-pricer; my instinct is the latter, especially as the rubbish vector shooter Battle of the Planets was unchanged from the Plus-only previews.)

Thanks to emulation, you can now play the totally unpirateable non-selling company-ruining terrible game, dongle and all: http://worldofspectrum.org/infoseekid.cgi?id=0004424 .

You might also be interested to see Gift From the Gods ( http://worldofspectrum.org/infoseekid.cgi?id=0002041 ) which is what Bandersnatch became after Imagine collapsed and lead Bandersnatch programmer John Gibson formed gun-for-hire favourites Denton Designs ( http://sincuser.f9.co.uk/040/htsquad.htm ). Notoriously dodgy Imagine reboot Finchspeed tried to make off with the official rights and reportedly there was a completed QL conversion that nobody's ever seen in any form, plus a 16-bit remix from Psygnosis renamed Brattacas ( http://brataccas.com/Page28.cfm and http://brataccas.net/?option=com_content&task=view&id=21&Itemid=35 ). Psyclapse, of course, never existed except as an ad.

One final thing: Mr Everiss's spirited defence of exactly the opposite of what he said at the time of Imagine's collapse might be caused by a confusion of terms. The posters here are clearly referring to casual ("playground") piracy, which the facts comprehensively prove since the invention of consumer computers contribute to a format's *success* with endless examples from the Apple II through the Speccy through the Playstation to the Nintendo DS and Microsoft Windows.

It's possible Mr Everiss is referring to *commercial* piracy, which was one of the reasons Imagine gave for their collapse ( http://users.globalnet.co.uk/~jg27paw4/yr07/yr07_03.htm#Imagine ), though exasperatingly in the vaguest possible terms: "Financial Director Ian Hetherington... claims that 300,000-400,000 pirated tapes were uncovered not long ago. (Could this be the first official mention of the oft-rumoured 'find' of bootlegs in a London warehouse back in January? Ed)" Does anyone have any solid info about this?

Incidentally, the Robocop 3 dongle was a zero-day crack and, er, prevented the game working at all on certain Amigas: http://eab.abime.net/showpost.php?p=103166&postcount=6 and http://oceanexp.proboards44.com/v45index.cgi?board=memory&action=display&thread=209&page=2 . Ocean rapidly undongled the game for re-release and never dongled again.

#63 James on 04.11.08 at 7:31 pm

I'm afraid there is no way Imagine would be running today. Even Ocean couldn't survive into the PS2 era.

Imagine believed their own hype. After some initially good games they released utter tripe and messed around with retailers by changing prices.

While it is true that tape to tape piracy impacted Spectrum software from 1986 onwards, to blame the demise of Imagine on this is pure comedy gold.

Ocean, US Gold, Domark, Codemasters and countless other software houses survived. The difference was that they didn't base their entire operation on hype.

I was in the industry at the time, everyone knew what was going on at Imagine. Hiring in flash cars, hype, and image rather than produce games that were any good.

The downfall of Imagine was Imagine. Piracy almost certainly did hit the bottom line as it did for the rest of us but I'm afraid that if the margins were that poor at Imagine that the reduction in sales alone led to the companies collapse then things must have been in a poor state. As for the GBP50 games, who were Imagine kidding exactly?

I'd also like to add that it is not possible to run pirated software on a PSP without a modification to the firmware inside the console. So it's not an "easy" console to pirate games for.

#64 Dudley on 04.11.08 at 8:13 pm

"The PSP is not definitely the hardest to pirate. You just download the bit torrent onto a memory card. This is why PSP games sell so badly. You are just plain wrong. Again.
"
Bruce mate, you're simply wrong on this one. Just plain 100% wrong. In fact if you get a new shop bought PSP Slim and can run a pirate game simply by copying an ISO to a memory card, I'll buy you the damn thing.

Even with launch PSPs they would have to have never used a firmware update, which pretty much means today that they've never played a game or used a UMD movie, because almost all of them have forced upgrades in order to play/watch. So for a PSP to be truly "easy" to pirate on you'd have to have owned it for at least 2 years and never turned it on. And even then it's by no means as easy as "Copy a game to a memory card".

--

"Hacking a fat PSP doesn't need a Pandora battery - the earlier firmwares were pretty easy to mod once people starting making the n00b-proof programs. After the later firmwares it was a little more tricky but I'd imagine the majority of PSPs are easily hackable."

Absolutely, by you can't copy a game to a memory card and expect it to work unless you have a Japanese launch PSP still running firmware 1.00, and even then it won't run remotely recent games without upgrades to the firmware you can only find on websites of at least medium repute.

#65 Peter Perpendicularly on 04.11.08 at 8:47 pm

As a few people seem to be interested in the Imagine liquidators' report, it's quite possibly available here:

http://companieshouse.gov.uk/WebCHeck/fastrack/

Irritatingly, the idiot site uses dynamic URLs so a straightforward link isn't possible, and Imagine's company number is surprisingly elusive -- it's not on any of the worldofspectrum.org ads or inlay scans, for example -- but from examining the likely suspects it has to be

Imagine Software Ltd: company number 01720850

(The obvious one, Imagine Software 1984 Ltd, is in fact the later Ocean incarnation.)

The info page says the papers have been archived so you have to ring up, but of course they're now closed for the weekend.

#65 Peter Perpendicularly on 04.11.08 at 8:47 pm

As a few people seem to be interested in the Imagine liquidators' report, it's quite possibly available here:

http://companieshouse.gov.uk/WebCHeck/fastrack/

Irritatingly, the idiot site uses dynamic URLs so a straightforward link isn't possible, and Imagine's company number is surprisingly elusive -- it's not on any of the worldofspectrum.org ads or inlay scans, for example -- but from examining the likely suspects it has to be

Imagine Software Ltd: company number 01720850

(The obvious one, Imagine Software 1984 Ltd, is in fact the later Ocean incarnation.)

The info page says the papers have been archived so you have to ring up, but of course they're now closed for the weekend.

#66 haowan on 04.11.08 at 11:53 pm

Another example of megagames sinking a company is Micro Power and Doctor Who and the Mines Of Terror. Yuo can read the Wikipedia page here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_Power

In essence, Mines Of Terror is often cited as the gane that sank Micro Power because it cost so much to develop and manufacture, and the only copy of the game they ever sold was to my family.

You can check it - they made bigger and bigger games and sold fewer and fewer copies - a combination of development time and niche markets. It's got nothign to do with piracy; if you make niche products you have to shoulder the responsibility of the corresponding market size.

#66 haowan on 04.11.08 at 11:53 pm

Another example of megagames sinking a company is Micro Power and Doctor Who and the Mines Of Terror. Yuo can read the Wikipedia page here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_Power

In essence, Mines Of Terror is often cited as the gane that sank Micro Power because it cost so much to develop and manufacture, and the only copy of the game they ever sold was to my family.

You can check it - they made bigger and bigger games and sold fewer and fewer copies - a combination of development time and niche markets. It's got nothign to do with piracy; if you make niche products you have to shoulder the responsibility of the corresponding market size.

#67 Rev. Stuart Campbell on 04.14.08 at 4:32 pm

I've ordered a copy of the final creditors' meeting report, which was the nearest thing they could find. Stand by!

#67 Rev. Stuart Campbell on 04.14.08 at 4:32 pm

I've ordered a copy of the final creditors' meeting report, which was the nearest thing they could find. Stand by!

#68 9572AD on 04.14.08 at 9:32 pm

"1) The game industry only succeeds when it has pirate proof product. If people can get games for free then they will. Hence the demise of boxed PC games when bit torrents came along. This is irrefutable and you are in denial continuing to try to imply that piracy is victimless."

I thought the only boxed PC games that were suffering were samey ego shooters with system requirements that will theoretically exist in three years.
At any rate, product has never been and will never be pirate proof, yet the industry continues.
Personally, I'd attribute any sales slump to people refusing to pay money to be harrassed by their software's "protection", as that's why I stopped purchasing.

#69 Bruce on 04.15.08 at 11:04 am

I would be fascinated to see the final creditor's meeting report. In it's entirety, not just edited highlights. I was not involved in the receivership process so have no idea what went on.
Obviously Imagine went bust because outgoings exceeded incomings. There were many factors that contributed to this, but the main one was the collapse in sales when tape to tape home piracy and large scale commercial piracy took off.
As I said in my article we tried many different strategies to counter this piracy, one of which was the megagemes. The megames were purely created as an anti piracy measure. If there had been no piracy we would not even have thought of the idea and would have continued churning out tape products.

Now different commentators may give different weight to the different factors in Imagine's demise.
Here are some:
1) Variable product quality.
2) Excessive premises costs.
3) Large staff overheads.
4) Flashy cars. (Very tabloid but in reality not a vast overhead)
5) Very high level of return from retail and consequent non payment of their accounts.

You can't say poor management decisions without saying what those decisions were.

However as I have pointed out before I was there, in charge of sales and marketing. And I saw the sales collapse once the copying genie was out of the bottle. The megagames were the last throw of the dice in order to beat the scourge.

The game industry survived for a while on the back of mainly budget games that were so cheap as not to be worth copying. Vitality only returned to game development and publishing in the UK when largely copy proof game consoles game along.

#69 Bruce on 04.15.08 at 11:04 am

I would be fascinated to see the final creditor's meeting report. In it's entirety, not just edited highlights. I was not involved in the receivership process so have no idea what went on.
Obviously Imagine went bust because outgoings exceeded incomings. There were many factors that contributed to this, but the main one was the collapse in sales when tape to tape home piracy and large scale commercial piracy took off.
As I said in my article we tried many different strategies to counter this piracy, one of which was the megagemes. The megames were purely created as an anti piracy measure. If there had been no piracy we would not even have thought of the idea and would have continued churning out tape products.

Now different commentators may give different weight to the different factors in Imagine's demise.
Here are some:
1) Variable product quality.
2) Excessive premises costs.
3) Large staff overheads.
4) Flashy cars. (Very tabloid but in reality not a vast overhead)
5) Very high level of return from retail and consequent non payment of their accounts.

You can't say poor management decisions without saying what those decisions were.

However as I have pointed out before I was there, in charge of sales and marketing. And I saw the sales collapse once the copying genie was out of the bottle. The megagames were the last throw of the dice in order to beat the scourge.

The game industry survived for a while on the back of mainly budget games that were so cheap as not to be worth copying. Vitality only returned to game development and publishing in the UK when largely copy proof game consoles game along.

#70 Peter St. John on 04.15.08 at 12:17 pm

The megames were purely created as an anti piracy measure.

Surely the point of the megagames was to use the extra memory and graphics capability of the add-on to stretch the boundaries of gaming?

'Modestly, Bruce Everiss was heard to say that "The Mega- games will make all other products obsolete overnight ..."'

Were you lying then, and it was all about piracy? That Bandersnatch and Psyclapse wouldn't have been as good as what eventually became Frankie Goes To Hollywood after all?

#71 Peter St. John on 04.15.08 at 12:24 pm

A little big more digging reveals these gems from Crash 7:

We then called Bruce Everiss and the confusion began to clear. When asked what was happening at Imagine Bruce replied shortly, ‘The company is up shit street. There has been no proper financial control. Not even a VAT return has been done.'

Bruce Everiss was left to find jobs for 60 people. ‘It makes me sick,' he said to CRASH, to think that the people who have worked so hard to make the wealth of Imagine have been left high and dry while the directors of the company have stripped it bare and got away scot free. They did everything to line their own pockets.'

#72 Bruce on 04.15.08 at 12:24 pm

What I said, in marketing mode, is not incompatible with the main reason for the megagames being anti piracy.
Accusing me of lying is out of order.

Obviously the idea was that the megagames would be vastly better than tape games. They had to be to justify the hefty premium. But this was not the reason behind their creation. That was anti piracy, pure and simple. I know because I was involved in the discussions leading to their creation. Initially we looked at putting a Z80 maths co processor in a dongle and using it to write more powerful code. This approach had the disadvantage of not being game specific.

#73 Bruce on 04.15.08 at 12:27 pm

Your quote from Crash 7 has no relevance to this discussion. It is just me venting my anger at the way my co directors were behaving.

#74 Peter St. John on 04.15.08 at 12:34 pm

Apologies for the lying accusation; it just seems a complete change from the 1983/4 rationalisation of the megagames. But I take issue with Crash 7 not having any relevance - the directors were trying to set up new companies, sneak away with the company's assets and mislead other companies into signing worthless deals to buy them a little more time. Which suggests that piracy was not the main reason that Imagine fell, but instead inexperience and negligence on the part of the directors played a major part...

#75 Ian Osborne on 04.15.08 at 12:48 pm

On a lighter note, is there any chance the All-Formats Computer Fairs could return? They were great fun. I bought my first printer from one such event, at the Birmingham Motorcycle Museum.

#76 Rev. Stuart Campbell on 04.15.08 at 7:02 pm

"Vitality only returned to game development and publishing in the UK when largely copy proof game consoles game along."

Which consoles are we talking about here? I'm confused, because by common consensus the console that caused the explosion in the UK industry (and most other places) was the Playstation, and the Playstation was one of the easiest consoles to pirate games on ever - certainly many, many times easier than any console before it, because it ran games off CD.

Throughout the entire history of gaming, "easy to pirate" = "huge success". It's almost impressive how flatly you continue to ignore/deny this empirical, astonishingly obvious fact.

#77 Bruce on 04.15.08 at 8:02 pm

Now Stuart you make even less sense.
Easy to pirate = huge success is the sort of thing game pirates say when they try and make out that their thieving is a victimless crime.

I have said this before but you obviously weren't paying attention. I was at Codemasters when they laid off 20% of their workforce directly as a result of Playstation piracy. It was not rubbish games, it was not flash cars, it was piracy. At the beginning of Playstation there was no piracy because burners were too expensive and chipping hadn't been worked out. So we prospered. But once the burner/chipping genie was out of it's bottle sales collapsed.

Once again I was there and I saw it happen. It affected many developers and publishers incredibly badly. Lots and lots of development staff got laid off throughout the industry and couldn't find jobs as nobody was hiring.

What you don't seem to realise is that some people have to pay for the game to pay the wages of the people that made it. When the vast majority are buying pirated games then there is no money to pay the wages. That is why Playstation development came to an abrupt halt and Playstation 2 development didn't. Playstation 2 wasn't pirated in the same way.

#77 Bruce on 04.15.08 at 8:02 pm

Now Stuart you make even less sense.
Easy to pirate = huge success is the sort of thing game pirates say when they try and make out that their thieving is a victimless crime.

I have said this before but you obviously weren't paying attention. I was at Codemasters when they laid off 20% of their workforce directly as a result of Playstation piracy. It was not rubbish games, it was not flash cars, it was piracy. At the beginning of Playstation there was no piracy because burners were too expensive and chipping hadn't been worked out. So we prospered. But once the burner/chipping genie was out of it's bottle sales collapsed.

Once again I was there and I saw it happen. It affected many developers and publishers incredibly badly. Lots and lots of development staff got laid off throughout the industry and couldn't find jobs as nobody was hiring.

What you don't seem to realise is that some people have to pay for the game to pay the wages of the people that made it. People have to pay for the game to pay the wages of the people that made it. When the vast majority are buying pirated games then there is no money to pay the wages. That is why Playstation development came to an abrupt halt and Playstation 2 development didn't. Playstation 2 wasn't pirated in the same way.

#78 Rev. Stuart Campbell on 04.15.08 at 8:04 pm

"Vitality only returned to game development and publishing in the UK when largely copy proof game consoles game along."

So set us straight - exactly when was this?

#79 9572AD on 04.16.08 at 2:46 am

Granted I'm not in Europe, so things could have gone differently over there, but I don't recall Playstation development coming to an abrupt end. It had one of the longest tails after the launch of a new generation of consoles that I've ever seen.

#80 Bruce on 04.16.08 at 7:17 am

[9572AD you ought to look at your facts before making statements like this.] PSX was launched in Japan in Dec 1994 and remained in production (as PS1) till March 2006.
Game releases slowed in 1999.
It slowed a real big lot in 2000.
And after that was a trickle, when the console still had 5 year's production. Considering the 2 year lead time to make most games it is very clear that the tap was turned off in 1998. There was no tail.
As I said before I was there, involved in the meetings and discussions. Piracy made continuing development uneconomic.

Here is the release list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_of_PlayStation_games

#81 Rev. Stuart Campbell on 04.16.08 at 8:32 am

Goodness. Damn those pirates for causing PS1 releases to slow in 1999 and drop off in 2000. It's the only possible explanation.

After all, it's definitely not like the Playstation 2 was announced in early 1999 and released in 2000 or anything, meaning that with "the 2 year lead time to make most games" its effect would start taking place from March '99 onwards.

[SUB: PLEASE CHECK]

#82 Rev. Stuart Campbell on 04.16.08 at 8:52 am

BRUCE:
"Game releases slowed in 1999.
It slowed a real big lot in 2000."

TRUTH (according to your own link):
1994 - 15 PS1 games released
1995 - 65
1996 - 129
1997 - 89
1998 - 97
1999 - 100
2000 - 78
2001 - 33
2002 - 52
2003 - 29

In other words, when you say game releases "slowed" in 1999, what you actually meant was "increased for the second year in succession". In 2000, by which time the PS2 was already out, it saw just 19 fewer releases than i 1998 when the PS2 was just a rumour.

Incidentally, the PS1 was easily pirateable from mid-1995 - I know this because I still have the credit card statement showing when I got CEX to do mine. Yet in 1996, releases almost doubled. Conversely, the harder-to-mod PSone came out in 2000. The next year, releases dropped by more than half, the biggest year-on-year fall i