Just watched Commercial Breaks on Youtube...

[yakmag]

What would the likelyhood of interviewing Mark Butler, David Lawson and/or Eugene Evans with reference to the collapse?

Maybe get some behind the scenes info or suchlike?

Don't know if it's been floated before, just a thought...

Would there be any interest?

[psj3809]

Its a fascinating documentary. The guy who directed it was at Replay over the weekend, they showed the whole documentary and also had Bruce Everiss there discussing it.

Still laugh at Bruces claims that all the schoolkids led to the downfall of Imagine due to home taping (But Ultimate and many others 'survived' ?). Personally think Imagine Mk I was all hype, there was the odd good game (Alchemist/Arcadia) but so many dire ones.

[NorthWay]

Imagine feels like the UK version of the Big Crash in the US.

Expectations of a business growing sky high with no stopping. Not understanding the market nor seeing the competition. Overvaluing your own product. Not having contigency(sp?) plans.

Getting _grand_ delusions as early as 1983(?) about your own greatness and how the market will pay through the nose for your output (3-4x the price of other products at the market at the same time). What if their hw games had gone to completion? How much would it have cost to produce them? How long would the lead time be? How much would they lose from unsold stock?

How long did it take before compression and multiloads made much bigger games anyway?

Making so-so games did not help either. All in all very sad as they were a rather professional developer from what I gather.
(But they had great marketing at least. Gone so fast, but still being remembered alongside the likes of Ultimate.)

[merman]

For me, the most interesting part of the documentary is David Ward's comments on piracy - that it was the big pirates producing commercial quantities of copied products that were the real problem, not the schoolkid who tapes a couple of copies for his mates. (OK, so Bruce had a point when he said in the talk at Replay that WH Smith's returns policy did not help, but I still feel it's an exaggeration that home taping killed Imagine.)

[joefish]

To me it seems that what killed Imagine was that they all actually started to believe the marketing bullshovelloads they'd paid Bruce to generate on behalf of the company. That they could grow forever and do no wrong. And all managed to overlook the fact that they didn't actually have any new or decent games to underpin it all.

It's true that revenue was lost to professional pirates, and it's true that kids taped games. But (a) it's an outright lie to count an amateurly copied game as a lost sale to a kid who couldn't afford to buy it or flat out wouldn't have paid the asking price for a weak title. But for someone still vainly trying to stay in the business it would be suicide to admit it. And (b) if you're going to blindly single out one part of your business and blame it outright for the failure, refusing to acknowledge anything else as contributory, then your businesses aren't going to last very long anyway.

[merman]

It was interesting listening to Bruce at the Replay talk - as was pointed out, he was not a shareholder of Imagine and was there till almost the bitter end instead of bailing out earlier (which might have been a good move). And while he proposed the add-on for the mega-games as a simple dongle to prevent piracy, when the plans exploded into extra memory and complicated ways of improving the technical specs of the machine it was plugged into, there was no way that the expectations could be met. Bruce did come up with some good ideas - the marketing without anything concrete to show did keep interest going, and the plans for a box full of goodies to add perceived value echoed Infocom. In the end the games did not arrive and the money ran out thanks to other peoples' bad decisions. And not piracy.

[joefish]

His blog is an entertaining read too.
On subjects like how 'consolodation' is the big buzz in the software industry. Barely a quarter of a century after Ocean bought Imagine and Special FX and everyone else in the UK, who then got bought up by Infogrames, who also bought Atari. Finger on the pulse there.

Then again, no-one ever accused a marketing department of being too grounded in reality.

[psj3809]

To me it seems that what killed Imagine was that they all actually started to believe the marketing bullshovelloads they'd paid Bruce to generate on behalf of the company. That they could grow forever and do no wrong. And all managed to overlook the fact that they didn't actually have any new or decent games to underpin it all.

It's true that revenue was lost to professional pirates, and it's true that kids taped games. But (a) it's an outright lie to count an amateurly copied game as a lost sale to a kid who couldn't afford to buy it or flat out wouldn't have paid the asking price for a weak title. But for someone still vainly trying to stay in the business it would be suicide to admit it. And (b) if you're going to blindly single out one part of your business and blame it outright for the failure, refusing to acknowledge anything else as contributory, then your businesses aren't going to last very long anyway.

Back in the 80's i was buying up as many games as i could on limited pocket money. Even when a friend had say Knight Lore i had to buy the original as i loved the style of their boxes and the games were such quality i had to have the original. Same for Elite and their arcade conversions, Commando/Bomb Jack, never had a copy, always the original.

But for a kid on say £1 a week pocket money there was only so many i could buy, so yes i pirated games but the quality software companies survived and made a lot of money

Imagine Mk I released a lot of very poor games in the early years with the odd exception, they made tons as it was the software boom of home computers arriving. Having a game with a £40 price just to stop piracy was a joke. Ocean survived for years, they released a lot of duds but also a lot of very good games. Imagine Mk I went OTT with spending it seemed but also the basic fact was they released a lot of over hyped average poor games, hence they went under.

As you say they just didnt have any great titles and instead blamed it on every spotty kid in school, wasnt the playground copying which killed Imagine Mk I, it was the head in the sand attitude of some of them and frankly a lot of dire games

[NorthWay]

"Pedro". Ahem...

[merman]

"Pedro". Ahem...

If that had come out in a glossy black box with the name Ultimate on it, people would still be raving about it and saying it was brilliant...

[NorthWay]

"Pedro". Ahem...

If that had come out in a glossy black box with the name Ultimate on it, people would still be raving about it and saying it was brilliant...

But it would be! The box, that is...
(Did they use Bob Wakelin for covers? Fantastic stuff he did, and the Imagine covers were great too. P.S http://news.bbc.co.uk/local/liverpool/h ... 450759.stm)