Notably, none of Psygnosis’s artists had much prior experience with computers the company preferred to hire exceptional artists in traditional mediums and teach them what they needed to know to apply their skills to computer games. They built an art team that became the envy of the industry around one Garvan Corbett, a talented illustrator and animator who had come to Psygnosis out of a workfare program in the very early days, before even Brataccas had been released, and who had been responsible for the precedent-setting graphics in Barbarian. Psygnosis hired far more artists rather than programmers as in-house employees. After the games already in the pipeline at the time of Barbarian‘s release were completed, future programming and design - such as the latter was in the world of Psygnosis - would mostly be outsourced to the hotshot young bedroom coders with which Britain was so amply endowed. In the wake of Barbarian‘s success, however, that approach was changed to prioritize what was really important in them. Psygnosis’s first games had been created entirely in-house, with much of the design and coding done by Lawson and Hetherington themselves. If Lawson and Ian Hetherington were disappointed to have abandoned more high-concept fare for simple games with spectacular visuals, they could feel gratified that, after all the years of failure and fiasco as Imagine, Finchspeed, Fireiron, and finally Psygnosis, they were at last consistently making games that made them actual money. Out were the old dreams of revolutionizing the substance of gaming via the megagame project in were simple, often slightly wonky action games that looked absolutely great to the teenage boys who devoured them. Reviewers were so busy gushing about the lengthy opening animation, the “strange-looking animals,” and the “digitised groans and grunts” that accompanied each swing of Hegor’s sword as he butchered them that they barely noticed the game’s more fundamental failings.īarbarian became the first unadulterated, undeniable hit to be created by the Imagine/Psygnosis nexus since Dave Lawson’s Arcadia had kicked everything off on the Sinclair Spectrum almost five years before. Released initially only on the Atari ST and the Commodore Amiga, just as the latter especially was about to make major inroads in Britain and Europe thanks to the new Amiga 500 model, it was one of the first games to really show what these 16-bit powerhouses could do in the context of a teenage-boy-friendly action game.
What it did have going for it back in the day, however, were its superb graphics and sound.
The control scheme - for some reason a consistent sore spot in almost every game Lawson programmed - once again annoys more than it ought to, and the game as a whole is certainly no timeless classic.
It rather takes the form of a linear progression through a series of discrete screens, fighting monsters and dodging traps as the titular barbarian Hegor. Programmed by the redoubtable Dave Lawson, Barbarian might be labeled an action-adventure if we’re feeling generous, although it offers nothing like the sort of open-ended living world other British developers of the era were creating under that label.