Editing Imagine Software (section)

===Financial troubles and demise===
Rumours of Imagine's financial situation began to circulate in December 1983 following the revelations that an estimated £50,000 of its advertising bills had not been paid.<ref name=Crash7.84>{{cite news | title=The Bubble Bursts | date=August 1984 | publisher=[[Newsfield Publications Ltd]] | url =http://www.crashonline.org.uk/07/news.htm | work =[[Crash (magazine)|Crash]] | access-date =18 December 2008 }}</ref> The following year the debts mounted, with further advertising and [[magnetic tape|tape]] duplication bills going unpaid, and Imagine was forced to sell the rights to its games to Beau Jolly in order to raise money. The company then achieved nationwide notoriety when it was filmed by a [[BBC]] [[documentary film|documentary]] crew while in the process of going spectacularly [[bankruptcy|bust]].<ref name=bbc_crash>{{cite news | first=Roger | last=Kean | title=The Biggest Commercial Break of Them All | date=December 1984 | publisher=[[Newsfield Publications Ltd]] | url=http://www.crashonline.org.uk/12/imagine.htm | work=[[Crash (magazine)|Crash]] | access-date=17 December 2008 | archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190105132126/http://www.crashonline.org.uk/12/imagine.htm | archive-date=5 January 2019 | url-status=dead }}</ref> Mark Butler also made an appearance on [[Thames Television]]'s ''Daytime'' programme in 1984, talking about his experience of having been a millionaire who lost his money at a young age.

On 28 June 1984 a [[writ]] was issued against Imagine by [[VNU Business Press]] for money owed for advertising in ''[[Personal Computer Games]]'' magazine, and the company was wound up on 9 July 1984 at the [[High Court of Justice|High Court]] in [[London]] after it was unable to raise the £10,000 required to pay this debt (though by this time its total debts ran to hundreds of thousands of pounds).<ref name=PCW19Jul84 /><ref name=PCW5Jul84 />