Psygnosis was the follow-up of the defunct 8-bit game company Imagine Software, where Lawson was one of the founders and 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 the original copyright owners. Lawson and Hetherington set up a new company called Finchspeed, which used "Bandersnatch" (one of Imagine's much-hyped but never completed "megagames") as the basis of what became "Brataccas", the first game published by Psygnosis.