Psygnosis
More info
- Creator
- Ian Hetherington, Jonathan Ellis
- Released
- 1984–2012
- Type
- Publisher, game developer
- Owner
- Sony (from 1993)
The Liverpool publisher with the owl logo that sold the Amiga on its looks and then became Sony's PlayStation studio.
Psygnosis rose in 1984 from the wreckage of Imagine Software, and its founders bet on the 16-bit machines rather than the Spectrum. Its games looked like nothing else on home computers: Shadow of the Beast (1989), with twelve layers of parallax and Roger Dean cover art, was a showreel for the Amiga, even if the game itself was best known for being unreasonably hard.
Scottish studio DMA Design's Lemmings (1991) became its best seller. Sony bought Psygnosis in 1993 and made it a European base for the PlayStation, where Wipeout (1995), with its techno soundtrack and The Designers Republic branding, became the console's cultural calling card. Renamed Studio Liverpool, it was shut down in 2012.