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We were part of a golden period in gaming that defined what we know as the current game industry." Some of what the programmers were doing, nobody had done before.

There was always something new and cool happening in one of the rooms somewhere some new technique being invented or some new hardware being tinkered with that no one had heard of before. What was clear was that we were involved in something very new indeed. After all, it was still very far from the mainstream at that point. "There was a definite paradigm shift going on in games, but where it was going to end up was very difficult to predict. "Throughout the period of moving from the Amiga and into CD-ROM territory, it felt like no one really knew what was going to happen," adds Mike Clarke, who worked as a sound artist at Psygnosis during this period.

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Ian's great skill was to provide a bunch of very creative people with some extremely expensive hardware and software and basically let them run loose. No one had done those cinematic intros before Psygnosis paved the way and no one else was thinking in terms of what could be achieved with the enhanced storage and playback opportunities CD-ROM offered. "I look back on it now and feel incredibly privileged to have been there at the birth almost of an entire medium. "As an artist it was incredibly exciting," recalls Neil Thompson, who is now employed as director of art and animation at Bioware in Canada. The foundation of a special R&D unit within Psygnosis - known as the Advanced Technology Group - helped the company to push the boundaries even further. In our early twenties we weren't big Yes fans." "My only recollection of Rick Wakeman was having to keep his son occupied one Saturday when he came to a meeting at the studio on Harrington Dock. There was a real feeling that we could do just about anything."

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It was also a really great mix of young gung-ho lads and experienced professional leaders all living a dream. "The studio itself was a fascinating mix of incredibly talented and driven people - true artists in their fields pushing boundaries. He joined the team as it found itself at the crest of a wave.

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" showed me the pre-rendered movie demos running on a Fujitsu FM Towns personal computer and I was utterly blown away - it was light years ahead of what anyone else was doing in the industry at the time," says Browne, who has since worked at the likes of THQ, Microprose and Universal Interactive Studios. This very ethos resulted in the famous Planetside demo, which caused former Psygnosis employee Richard Browne's jaw to drop when he saw it in action at a trade show.

He gave us the time to achieve perfection rather than hustle us to 'get it out the door'." "Ian Hetherington was a true visionary who was never happy to sit back on his laurels. "It was probably the most exciting and rewarding part of my 30 year programming career," says former Psygnosis staffer John Gibson, an industry veteran who now works as a principal programmer at Sony Computer Entertainment's Evolution Studios. Its pre-existing focus on creating lavish, cutting-edge visuals put the company in the perfect position to exploit the massive storage space offered by CD-ROM. Co-founded by the charismatic Ian Hetherington, the company invested heavily in the latest graphical technology, including Amiga rendering package Sculpt 4D and a raft of expensive Silicon Graphics workstations. One of the companies which adapted best - and consequently found itself at the forefront of this technical revolution - was Liverpool-based Psygnosis, famed for publishing titles like Shadow of the Beast, Lemmings and Barbarian on home computer formats. Are you a bad enough dude to be miniaturised and injected into the body of the president? This meant having to master a whole new range of design disciplines, including video, CGI, CD-quality music and much more besides. During this time of intense upheaval, development studios had to shift from creating relatively simplistic cartridge-based titles to games that could make use of over 600 MB of storage space.

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Waxing lyrical about the dramatic transition from cartridges to CDs might seem somewhat twee in this era of seamless digital downloads and cavernous terabyte hard drives, but back in the early 90s the entire industry - and those who followed its progress dutifully - was caught up in the excitement and anticipation of the glorious, data-rich future that those shiny plastic discs promised.Ĭompanies such as Sega, Nintendo, NEC, Apple and Fujitsu threw millions upon millions of dollars of R&D budget into CD-based gaming hardware, while PC developers embraced the expansive storage offered by the medium to create games with full motion video sequences, hours of spoken dialogue and high-quality audio.