A History of Psygnosis in 12 Games

Today’s announcement of the closure of Sony’s Liverpool studio, formerly known as Psygnosis, shuts the doors on one of the most influential publishing and development names in gaming.

Psygnosis began life in the hot creative and commercial maelstrom of the UK games industry at the tail-end of the 1980s, when talented developers were moving on from 8-bit computers like the Sinclair Spectrum and Commodore 64 to significantly more powerful machines such as the Commodore Amiga and Atari ST. The label gathered a huge following with its distinctive logo and graphically rich games from top-talent developers, often marketed in impressive packages.

After a string of hits, the firm made the shift to consoles via an acquisition by Sony, helping to launch the original PlayStation with landmark titles like Wipeout and Colony Wars. It helped Sony with those successful consoles, PS2 and PSP.

But along the way Psygnosis, renamed as SCE Studio Liverpool, was downgraded from publishing brand to development arm, focusing increasingly on the ever-decreasing circle of the franchise that made its name.

So, here’s a highly subjective list of 12 games that tell the story of Psygnosis and of SCE Studios Liverpool.

Note, many of the games listed were available for multiple platforms. For the sake of brevity we have named the single platform where we believe the game had most impact.

When Psygnosis formed in the late 1980s, its main function was to gather and collect the best games for new home computers then being generated by those small indie teams with little or no access to the market. In those days, there was no Steam. All games had to be marketed through retail. The company’s founders earned a solid reputation for hard-nosed business and for an appreciation of artistic gaming. This was an era when plenty of cash-in games came to market with little or no merit. Shadow of the Beast from Reflections was a heavily-marketed side-scrolling platformer with lovely visuals, tingly music and sweet parallax scrolling that delighted the emerging Amiga generation.

DMA Design’s solid classic established Psygnosis as a major name in game publishing, and helped move the company forward from the excesses and failures of its progenitor, a 1980s company called Imagine that went puff due to mismanagement. DMA had previously worked with Psygnosis on well-liked Amiga games like Blood Money and Menace. But Lemmings took standard platforming, turned it upside down, and shook the box vigorously. Players guided tiny lemmings from A to B negotiating hazards and solving puzzles on multiple levels, a precursor to the real-time strategy boom that was to follow. Lemmings is one of the defining games of the golden-age of British game design.

Psygnosis began life churning out graphically impressive games for Amiga and Atari ST, a factory system of talented artists welded together with fairly basic gameplay mechanics. Agony from Art & Magic was just one of these games, a lush two-dimensional side-scrolling shooter featuring an owl as the main protagonist. Strange piano-led soundtrack added to the feeling of artistry but, not unusually for the period, the shallow gameplay lacked staying power and is best-remembered as an example of early-90s atmospheric artistry.

Few games illustrate the magic of PlayStation’s arrival like Wipeout, a hip-to-the-kids remix of multiple-layer sci-fi driving and electronic music. The game has been reworked so many times it’s easy to forget that the simplicity of the original, all time-trial exercises and bonuses, as well as an absolute sense of gravity and space. Sony management, having smartly bought Psygnosis in order to get PlayStation off the ground, celebrated its win with night-club installations of the game. Wipeout became the company’s mascot for a generation of kids who had grown up with NES but didn’t want to grow out of games.

This PlayStation 1 title came soon after the console’s launch in 1995, a Reflections-developed celebration of all the dumbest, most-fun moments in driving games, an absolute talisman of Sony’s single-minded drive to no-frills, knuckle-headed, mass-market appeal. It had racetracks, sure, but the great combat arena was where the auto-crunching action took place, the entire point being merely to crash into other cars and inflict as much damage as possible. The result was a PS1-festoon of polygon-shards and crunched bodies, very much of its time, a tech-demo that lost its charm fairly quickly but nonetheless moved automotive game physics forward and made a lot of people happy, endlessly crashing cars.

Voiced by Monty Python’s Eric Idle, here was an ambitious attempt to bring Terry Pratchett’s popular comic franchises to gaming. It was an unusual point-and-click adventure of graphical depth and humor, but steeped in tough puzzles. The backgrounds for this enormous world were all hand-drawn, once again a nod to Psygnosis as a brand that was all about visuals and experimentation.

Long before Mass Effect's multiple-ending space-epic, there was Colony Wars. Players engaged in 3D space-shooter missions which then affected how the game-world progressed. Graphically lush, the gameplay was interspersed with cutscenes and voice-overs which, while crude by today’s standards, wowed reviewers of the day. IGN’s Julian Rignall called it “the best PlayStation action game yet, bar none”. The game inspired a trilogy, still fondly remembered today and was a central part of Psygnosis' best years during the PlayStation years, alongside shooter G-Police, and RC racer Rollcage, among others.

After a decade of enormous growth and success on multiple platforms (Wipeout 64 was a notable example) the Psygnosis brand was retired as the company was folded into Sony‘s global network of game developers. Its Liverpool HQ was given the charmless name SCE Studio Liverpool. All this was part of a global reorganization in anticipation of the coming of PlayStation 2. SCE Liverpool’s first game for the new console was an okayish driving licence, Formula One 2001. It ended the era of the company as a wide-ranging publisher across multiple skills and brought in a decade when the studio focussed mostly on racing (many more annualized F1 games were to follow) and then racing-combat. In a way, it was the beginning of the end.

As PlayStation 2 began its incredible success-curve, demands grew for a new Wipeout game. SCE Liverpool had moved on from the Psygnosis years and many of the original team had long gone. The ideas that had inspired that earlier generation were no longer seen as relevant. In any case, Wipeout had been iterated so many times, that it had begun to feel familiar and old. This was not a time for nostalgia, but of reinvention. The soundtrack lacked that vim of the 1990s original, but visually the game offered a great deal more variety, more futurescape deserts and jungles than holographic LSD rollercoasters. IGN reviewer Rick Sanchez wrote that, despite initial misgiving at the new direction, he found it to be one of the most fun games available for the new console.

As with the original PlayStation, the studio gave Sony something to crow about for the launch of PSP. Wipeout Pure was just as stylish, slick and beguiling as the PSP itself, a demonstration of the machine’s graphical supremacy over its rivals and of Sony’s dominance over interactive entertainment. 2005 was the year that development began on another portable device that could play games, the iPhone.

Throughout the last decade, SCE Liverpool cranked out very decent WipeOut games for PSP including Wipeout Pure and Wipeout Pulse. This was a PS3 downloadable celebration of those games and of the franchise, offering the same tracks at 60 frames-per-second in high-definition. It was a demonstration of the craft that the team at SCE Liverpool was capable of producing, a genuinely exciting, impressive, compelling production that made the hardware sing, all marks of the Psygnosis heritage. The game spawned an equally impressive expansion, Fury, that offered new modes and multiplayer bug fixes.

Psygnosis had once been one of the most revered name in games publishing. The company was instrumental in the successful launch of PlayStation and remained a core component in Sony’s success over the next decade-and-a-half. It’s fitting, perhaps, that the studio’s last game represents its decline to a single-genre outlier in Sony’s development empire. Wipeout 2048 is a great-looking title, albeit a shade predictable. Ultimately, it’s made for a machine that represents many of Sony’s woes right now, a lack of money to combat incursions into gaming by iPhone. It’s a shame that this studio isn’t being handed the resources to tackle the one area where Sony has managed to grasp change, that being its downloadable PSN offerings. This is where the entrepreneurial and artistic spirit of the defined Psygnosis is most needed.

What are your favorite games and memories from Psygnosis and SCE Liverpool? Let us know in comments.