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GAMES OF MY YEARS: MASTERTRONIC - by Mr Biffo

4/8/2016

34 Comments

 
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Do you remember when games cost just £1.99? You'd be forgiven for not remembering that, because for the most part games were never that cheap. Unless you're talking about Steam or iOS games, but for the purposes of this piece I'm prepared to pretend they don't exist.

​When you look back at the days of the ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64, games have always been expensive. Arguably, you get much more bang for your pennies nowadays.

​Heck, in real terms, games are actually cheaper than they used to be - and providing you don't mind contracting dysentery from other people's filthy bum-fingers, there's a thriving second hand market, thanks to retailers like CEX.

But what could you do back in the day, before second-hand games were a thing, if you wanted a new game, but didn't want to resort to the dirty act of piracy?

​In my case, I went to Freemans, the corner shop at the top of my road.
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WHAT TYPE CAVE PLZ?
Freemans was a bit of an Aladdin's cave.

The front of the shop was magazines, comics, and pick and mix. The rear had toys; toys which were yellowed and dusty, and looked as if they'd been on the shelves since the mid-60s, or earlier.

​One of the boxes they had on one of the higher shelves was for a Dan Dare radio set; this was before Fleetway relaunched Dan Dare in a revamped Eagle comic, in 1982. Prior to that I only had vague awareness of who Dan Dare was, but I liked the look of his radio set. I never bought it, of course. I don't know if anyone ever bought it. One day it just disappeared from the shelves. Perhaps they discovered it had asbestos or uranium in it.

Aside from that one treasure, the shelves were mostly full of blister-carded cheap and cheerful toys; cop and cowboy and secret agent gear for the boys down one side, and dangerous-looking doll accessories for girls down the other.

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There was a spinny rack of practical jokes - nail through finger, fly in ice cube, fart powder etc. And I was always somewhat fascinated by their CCTV : one of those black half-spheres, which hung from the ceiling with multiple camera lenses.

It reminded me of an evil version of Wordy, from the BBC schools programme Words And Pictures.


I don't know if it was caught on their security tapes, but I once pooed my pants in the toy aisle, and ran home without telling my friends. When I arrived, I hid my soiled underwear in a ring binder. If only I'd been "ring bound" before leaving the house, eh... 

This is a fact I remember wistfully whenever I pay one of my occasional visits to Freemans, which is still there (albeit called something else now). They've walled off the toy aisles sadly, the once-sprawling magazine section now reduced to a handful of titles, and the pick and mix jars which used to be behind the counter have been replaced with bottles of spirits. 

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JUNGUN MINGIS
Freemans was the only place I'd ever seen computer games for sale, outside of computer shops, Woolworths, or John Menzies.

They greeted you as you entered; a custom display at the front of the shop for Mastertronic's £1.99 range; ZX Spectrum games on one side, C64 on the other.

£1.99 was about a tenth of what most games cost back in the day, and - conveniently - a penny cheaper than my weekly pocket money, which meant I'd always have enough left over for a foam shrimp.

The first Mastertronic game I bought was a darts simulator, 180 - which had been co-created by lovely Ste Pickford, who I'd later work with on Future Tactics. I'd intended it to be a replacement for my real dartboard - which had to be thrown away, because my father vomited on it after returning home from a party, somewhat troubled with the drink.
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There seemed to be new Mastertronic games whenever I returned to Freemans; Bionic Granny, Ninja, 3D Maze. Unfortunately, for every Finders Keepers - a surprisingly decent mix of Jet Set Willy and Pyjamarama - or One Man And His Droid - a sci-fi shepherding simulator - there was a Streaker, a game in which you controlled a nude man on a quest to find his stolen clothes.

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PRICE RISE
Gradually, Mastertronic moved into pricier games, first £2.99, then moving up to full-price releases for its M.A.D - Mastertronic Added Value - range.

At one point, the company was the market-leading computer games publisher in the UK - a position which led to them distributing the Master System across the UK and Europe.

The success of this move - the Master System beating the NES into a distant second - convinced Virgin to buy the company.

Eventually, Sega established its own European operation - much of Mastertronic's staff moving to Sega Europe, with the remainder staying behind at the newly-monickered Virgin Interactive.

The Mastertronic brand eventually moved owners, before becoming established as Mastertronic Group - though 33 years on from its founding, it has appeared to have disappeared altogether, after filing for bankruptcy at the end of last year. Ironically, the brand was briefly offered to potential buyers for the budget price of £1.99.

​Which, alas, isn't true. But what a fitting end it would have been.

FROM THE ARCHIVE:
GAMES OF MY YEARS: BBC MICRO BY MR BIFFO
GAMES OF MY YEARS: ASTRO WARS BY MR BIFFO
THE GAMES OF MY YEARS: ATARI - PART ONE BY MR BIFFO​

34 Comments
Jammy Jim
4/8/2016 11:26:17 am

Young Biffo never did beat me at 180. MUAHHAH-HAH-HAH-HAH-AAAAH!

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Mr Biffo
4/8/2016 11:29:26 am

Wot?

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Alastair
4/8/2016 11:58:53 am

They certainly had a cool logo. I think some of their tapes for our old Speccy or Dragon still lurk in my parents' garage.

It's hard to remember the difference between a budget title and AAA back then, was there any?

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Dizzy the egg
4/8/2016 12:38:55 pm

AAA featured Dizzy the egg

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Nige
4/8/2016 01:03:15 pm

AAA games wouldn't fit in to your cassette tape organisers.

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Scott C
4/8/2016 08:40:54 pm

But neither did the budget boxes containing multiple games.

Mr Cheese
4/8/2016 12:03:11 pm

Freeman's also had this: the arcade games. Track and Field, Buck Rogers: Planet of Zoom, Traverse USA, Moon Patrol. It was the daddy, Daddy.

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Chris
4/8/2016 12:04:08 pm

I had loads of the Mastertronic range on the C16 (don't judge me).
Formula 1 (or was it just called Grand Prix?), Squirm, Tutti Frutti, Big Mac, Video Nasties, Fingers Malone and others I've temporarily forgotten. Most of them were written by Shaun Southern. Actually pretty sure Shaun was the only person writing games for the C16.

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Russ
4/8/2016 01:42:30 pm

It was Formula 1 Simulator. They also did Speed King which was like Formula 1 Simulator but on a bike!

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Chris
4/8/2016 02:09:01 pm

Speed King, yes! I'm not sure I had that on the C16 though, the screenshots look familiar, but as you say it's pretty much identical to F1S...

B
4/8/2016 12:21:11 pm

Picking up the rage inducing super glue in Finders Keepers and permanently losing an item slot is something I did over and over and over. My mapping skill were lacklustre.

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DrDagless
4/8/2016 12:57:23 pm

Isn't 'Filthy Bum Fingers' also the name of your next children's TV project?

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Mungo
4/8/2016 01:34:20 pm

For me it was Kandy corner that used to sell these...loved loved loved them..always envious when I see people's collections of these,think I've got 20 or so somewhere

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Retroresolution link
4/8/2016 01:40:17 pm

Mr. B, the nostalgia-tinged gift that keeps giving - seeing Wordy brings a tear to the eye.
Speaking of eyes, hope your beleaguered peeper is well on the mend now, but if not, perhaps that's the reason for proclaiming the third letter of the acronym M.A.D stood for 'value', rather than 'dimension'?

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Jopijedd
4/8/2016 02:19:10 pm

Sadly living out in the sticks, the local shop couldn't fathom any reasons for stocking video games, but the hardware shop near my grandparents home in Corsham did. I swear nobody in the shop had a fizzogging clue of what they were selling, but every so often, i'd wander in and buy something from Mastertronic, Codemasters or Amsoft for a couple of quid.

I'm sure others will make further corrections, but i recall Mastertronic Added Dimension (MAD) titles mainly retailing at £2.99 or £3.99, and they appeared about the same time as the Ocean re-release KIXX imprint which took a similar price point.

Finally, Wordy was from Look and Read. FFS, Wordwatchers.

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China Hill
4/8/2016 04:22:53 pm

Oceans budget label was Hit Squad. Hit Squad also had the Domark catalogue at their disposal.

Kixx was US Gold.

MAD didn't last as long as the £3.99 point which came about after the VAT rise in the early 90's.. By then Mastertronic were a spent force and Codemasters, Hit Squad and Kixx dominated.

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Acid_Arrow
4/8/2016 02:29:15 pm

From memory, the Mastetronic title I spent most time on was Kikstart 2. On the spectrum it was an unresponsive, buggy mess with terrible collision detection really but once you accepted the bugs were just part of the gameplay it was a lot of fun.

I seem to remember you getting a 'bonus' jump in the air, so you could jump off an obstacle then jump again in mid-air to get more height, I don't think it had any sound either but it actually ended up being one of my favourite games. For this reason alone Mastertronic are officially wicked.

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J Griffin
4/8/2016 02:47:23 pm

Mastertronic actually had a second lease of life as a budget publisher in the early '00s with a revival of their M.A.D/Mastertronic line for budget-priced PC Games. Was strangely heartwarming to see, as well as providing a proper avenue for getting older games at decent prices beyond praying for a hefty enough discount. They finally threw in the towel only a couple of years ago, after Steam finally rendered the boxed PC games market largely obsolete.

A little info on it here: http://www.pcgamesn.com/time-steam-ode-budget-boxed-pc-game

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Dan Whitehead
4/8/2016 03:23:19 pm

I used to get mine from an absolutely tiny record shop called Music Box (it was literally the size of a box) in Stalybridge (where they filmed Jossy's Giants). Because the shop was so small (the size of a box) none of the games were actually on display - you had to ask the weary shopkeeper to get a binder from behind the counter that had the inlay cards and browse through that. And I did. For HOURS at a time. I'm sure he was really happy when I finally made my choice and he got £1.99 for his trouble. I also remember ordering the Dan Dare game from him, and then pestering him every week for months until it came in.

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Leigh
5/8/2016 12:46:58 am

Dan, what size was the shop plz?

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Dan Whitehead
12/8/2016 03:19:33 pm

It was about the size of a box. A small one.

Lorfarius
4/8/2016 03:33:31 pm

There's a history book on the way about them! https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/15723376/the-mastertronic-archives/description

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Chris Wyatt
4/8/2016 05:57:59 pm

They did Pippo I think; one of my fave Speccy games. Had no idea they distributed Master System; either that or I just forgot.

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ALEX
4/8/2016 07:17:01 pm

My Mum's friend bought me Streaker for Christmas when I was about 10. It wasn't great but it was certainly unusual. I sometimes wondered if I was the only person who had ever played it.

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Leigh
5/8/2016 12:41:53 am

I did! It... wasn't the worst game I owned. Mastertronic stuff was a wee bit more reliable than some of the utter jizz Firebird Silver cheerfully pumped out.

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Memory man
4/8/2016 07:18:21 pm

What what what?!? Round my way, in the 8 bit era, your WH Smiths etc had a wide and splendid range of £1.99 and £2.99 games. And the posh full price games were usually £9.99/10.99. Certainly not "ten times more" than £1.99.

Did I just grow up in a lucky enclave of Spectrum bargainry?

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Chris
4/8/2016 07:57:05 pm

Pretty sure that was the correct price for a full price Spectrum title. I could never afford them though, so I might be wrong.

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Nige
4/8/2016 08:46:17 pm

Speccy full price games were usually a quid cheaper than CPC and C64. So 8.99 and 9.99 respectively as far as I remember.

Our local Smiths had loads of games too and Boots had a few!

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Leigh
5/8/2016 12:45:02 am

I remember full-price Speccy games creeping up over the tenner mark right at the end, but by then nobody was buying them anyway. Apart from me when Street Fighter II came out, just to see if it was actually real.

Chinnyhill10
5/8/2016 06:16:05 am

Such was the state of the Speccy market in 1993 when Street Fighter 2 came out, it got dumped out onto budget in under 6 months on the Kixx label. The Speccy budget re-release is very collectable.

James Newton
5/8/2016 09:18:13 am

This beat is, this beat is, this beat is Mastertronic. Top notch article that had me reminiscing, and reminded me about another budget way of publishing games that has largely disappeared, the compilation. I have particularly fond memories of Now Games and The Best of Beyond, both of which broadened my gaming horizons and without which I would never have played the superb Pyjamarama or Lords of Midnight.

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Matty link
5/8/2016 05:28:01 pm

Mastertronic were the nearest thing to an indie games market in the '80s. A lot of the budget houses generally used the same teams or programmers but Mastertronic seemed to publish pretty much anything by anyone, they kept the "bedroom coder" thing going as the 8-bit market became more corporate.

The Magic Knight series was the highlight for me. Amazingly innovative and clever games.

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Penyrolewen
5/8/2016 09:00:56 pm

Nah, you lot are right.
Speccy games (as I remember) were multi-tiered when it came to price. About £5 was the norm when the spec was new, then came the "£10 but you get a big box" games, then along came all the £1.99 games, loads of good games released at that price. Then there were the "£15 but you get a big box and lots of hype" games like Valhalla, Elite, maybe Lords of Midnight. Or was that a tenner?
Got a story about Valhalla, I'll bore you with it one day. How's your eye biff? Like a star in a limpid pool at midnight again? Hope so. Ahoy

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Andrew Lowe link
8/8/2016 08:00:54 am

We need a remake of Streaker.

And there's definitely a budget game somewhere in the shitted-pants story.

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