“Our accountant just couldn’t believe it. He thought we’d end the year with about £2,000 in profits”. So said Mark Butler, co-founder of Imagine Software, in a profile in the first ever issue of Home Computer Weekly in March 1983, celebrating Imagine’s mega-success. He formed the company in 1982 with Dave Lawson, previously of Bug-Byte. Their early games did very well, although exactly how much so is harder to verify in a less-documented time. “[The computer software market is] going to get more and more like the record market. There will even be a Top 10 software chart.” Butler mused in one aside in that interview. He also said that Imagine’s staff numbers would never exceed 25 “since it would start getting less efficient”.

By early 1984, Imagine had never scored a #1 game, but had expanded to more than 100 staff. It had started work on two mega-games, Psyclapse and Bandersnatch, to be sold in huge boxes at a price of about £40. The BBC chose Imagine as the subject for a half-hour documentary as part of its Commercial Breaks series, an episode to be about the process of making and selling software. They ended up instead capturing the collapse of Imagine Software, including bailiffs turning up at its office. Psyclapse and Bandersnatch were never finished. The latter lent its name to a Black Mirror episode set in the British software scene of the 1980s.

Imagine’s accounts had turned out to be unbelievable in a rather different way. As its operations manager Bruce Everiss told the BBC: “I’ve had a look at the financial records of the company and there has never been a VAT return, never a bank reconciliation […] just no financial control at all.” In a scathing editorial, Crash’s Roger Kean said that “Imagine excelled at one thing very well, publicity. […] It hit the headlines again and again with fanciful stories of teenage programmers earning £35,000 a year. If you are very successful at creating an image of success then it’s amazing how willingly banks and other investors will pour money in.”

The Commercial Breaks episode ultimately didn’t just focus on Imagine. It also featured Ocean, turning it into the tale of a Liverpool-Manchester rivalry and setting up a new ending. Just as Ocean had benefited from the collapse of Century Electronics at the start of 1984, snapping up all the rights to Hunchback, they saw an opportunity in Imagine’s fate. The program ended with Ocean stepping in and buying the rights to Imagine’s name and logo. 

So it was that when negotiating an agreement with Konami for rights to its arcade games, Ocean had a ready solution to concerns that its own successful brand might drown out Konami’s. The two companies agreed that Ocean’s home computer conversions of Konami games would get a whole label to themselves, and that label would be Imagine. In August 1985, about a year after its demise, Imagine’s name appeared at the top of the UK software charts for the first time.

  • Hyper Sports (Konami/Imagine, 1984/1985, ZX Spectrum)
  • Hyper Sports (Konami/Imagine, 1984/1985, Commodore 64)

Hyper Sports started life as an arcade machine released in Japan as Hyper Olympic ‘84, a sequel to the original Hyper Olympic which had become Track & Field in the UK. For this sequel, Konami branched out from athletics to a wider range of Olympic sports, including swimming, gymnastics, shooting, archery and weightlifting. That meant more variety in gameplay approaches as well. The swimming still has the same hammering of alternate buttons, but you have to take a break to press a button every so often in response to a “BREATH” command. The shooting, horse vault, and archery are all based more on timing than on button-mashing speed. There’s only so complex you can go with three buttons, mind. Your Spectrum reported Konami selling a special Spectrum controller to better replicate the arcade experience, although I’ve yet to find further evidence of that controller.

  • Hyper Sports (Konami, Arcade, 1984)
  • Hyper Sports (Konami, Arcade, 1984)

The lead for the Commodore 64 version of Hyper Sports was Dave Collier, fresh from Daley Thompson’s Decathlon, with music again by Martin Galway. Galway decided to base it on Vangelis’s “Chariots of Fire”, approximated from memory, and Ocean actually stumped up for the licence to let him make it more accurate. Your 64 hailed Hyper Sports as having “the best soundtrack yet heard on any micro this side of the solar system”. The Spectrum version of the game was handled by Jonathan “Joffa” Smith, who took about four months to produce it as his first solo game for the company. He worked with the arcade version in his room, together with video recordings of it.

The same Your 64 review compared the graphics unfavourably to those of Epyx’s Summer Games, and Computer & Video Games reviewed it alongside Summer Games II which it gave an even more positive response to. Home-computer-specific sports games, with a different kind of sophistication, were coming to take the place of the likes of Hyper Sports. For now, though, arcade flash won out. Several reviews mention the graphic details like the exaggerated wink to camera your competitor does when winning the shooting, the biggest example of the kind of visual flair carried over from Konami’s version. C&VG had British heptathlete Judy Simpson add comments and she said that “these graphics are almost as good as the arcades”. 

  • Hyper Sports (Konami/Imagine, 1984/1985, Commodore 64)
  • Hyper Sports (Konami/Imagine, 1984/1985, ZX Spectrum)

Home Computing Weekly’s E.D. was pleased that “the graphics maintain the cute quality of the original games” and Commodore User’s M.P. that “the graphics and gameplay are so similar that you find yourself looking for a coin slot”. In Home Computing Weekly’s earlier review of the Spectrum version, reviewer D.M. showed that the ultimate appeal hadn’t changed since the original Hyper Olympic, delightedly reporting that “my joystick was literally hot, and I wore the skin off a finger swimming – a new world record!”.

  • Hyper Sports (Konami/Imagine, 1984/1985, ZX Spectrum)
  • Hyper Sports (Konami/Imagine, 1984/1985, Commodore 64)

Crash’s review mentioned Hyper Sports as “what could be called the real follow-up to Daley Thompson’s Decathlon” which raises an interesting point, even as they were talking about a Spectrum version that wasn’t made by the same team as that game had been. Daley Thompson’s Decathlon had been a very thinly-disguised version of Hyper Olympic/Track & Field, and here was an official version of that game’s sequel. While the people in charge of Ocean later reported the Imagine arrangement as being for Konami’s benefit, it also worked in their favour to give them another quite separate identity for a second shot at a sequel.

  • Daley Thompson’s Supertest (Ocean, 1985, ZX Spectrum)
  • Daley Thompson’s Supertest (Ocean, 1985, ZX Spectrum)

When Computer Gamer’s T.H. reviewed Hyper Sports, they ended the review by asking where it left the forthcoming Daley Thompson’s Supertest. “Development of it was well on its way when the Konami deal was signed. Either way it will do well if it matches the quality of Hyper Sports which is destined for number one.” Supertest was not destined for number one, at least in the combined formats chart, but #2 behind The Way of the Exploding Fist was a strong performance too. The Spectrum version, as reported by Joffa Smith, was largely hacked together in a hurry from barely-altered bits of Hyper Sports code. Ocean had taken the downfall of their rivals Imagine and used it to branch their biggest success to date in two.

  • Gallup combined formats chart for fortnight ending 30 July 1985, Home Computing Weekly
  • Gallup combined formats chart for week ending 31 August 1985, Popular Computing Weekly

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