SCE Studio Liverpool

Psygnosis was founded in Liverpool in 1984 by Ian Hetherington, Jonathan Ellis and David Lawson. It grew out of Imagine Software, a failed 8-bit games company that Lawson had co-founded and where Hetherington had been financial director. It became a limited company in July 1985 and that September showed its first game, Brataccas (1985), which reused ideas from an Imagine project that was never finished. For almost ten years its black boxes with Roger Dean artwork were its calling card.

Although it mainly published games by outside developers, it kept artists on staff to work with them, and it set out to push the Amiga's hardware. Obliterator (1988) started its habit of elaborate intro animations, and Shadow of the Beast (1989), with its multi-layered parallax scrolling, became one of its biggest hits. In 1991 it published DMA Design's Lemmings, which was ported to a huge range of platforms and cemented its reputation.

In 1993 it was bought by Sony Electronic Publishing, later folded into Sony Computer Entertainment. Psygnosis began building games around the PlayStation, which launched in the West in September 1995, and that period produced Wipeout, G-Police and the Colony Wars series. It also put forward a PC-based PlayStation development system, made with SN Systems, which Sony adopted. In 1999 Sony began absorbing the company, and in 2000 the Psygnosis brand was dropped in favour of SCE Studio Liverpool.

Under its new name it released Formula One 2001 (2001), its first PlayStation 2 game, and made eight instalments of the series between 2001 and 2007; Sony's Formula One licence then expired without renewal before the 2007 season. It also kept Wipeout going with Wipeout Fusion (2002), Wipeout Pure (2005), a PSP launch title, Wipeout Pulse (2007) and Wipeout HD (2008) for PlayStation 3. Sony announced its closure on 22 August 2012. In 2013 former staff set up Firesprite, which Sony bought in 2021, and Playrise Digital.