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Psygnosis was a British company that published moody computer games boasting psychedelic cover art by Yes artist Roger Dean.Founded by Ian Hetherington and Jonathan Ellis, the Liverpool-based Psygnosis was essentially born from the ashes of defunct 8-bit game company Imagine, where Hetherington was Financial Director. After the collapse of Imagine in 1984, the name and trademarks were bought by Ocean Software, while the rights of the software remained with original copyright owners. The fabled mega-games being created by the company, Bandersnatch (for the ZX Spectrum) and Psyclapse (for the Commodore 64), were fused into one to become Psygnosis' first release, called Brataccas. This game was originally created for the Sinclair QL, but was instead ported over to other Motorola 68000-based machines and released on the Commodore Amiga, Atari ST, and Apple Mac in 1985.
Later, Psygnosis would become famous for the Shadow of the Beast, wipEout and Lemmings games.
Psygnosis was acquired by Sony in 1993 to work on the new PlayStation machine, and in 1999 eventually lost the Psygnosis branding to become known as Sony Studio Liverpool.
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