A Brief history of Mastertronic
Mastertronic was founded
in 1983 by Martin Alper, Frank Herman and Alan Sharam, they also had some
financial backing from another small outside group of investors, and previous
experience in video distribution. The first premises were in the back of Alan
Sharam's offices (he was also a surveyor at the time) in George St, London W1.
Initially they used to
make up packages of 100 tapes ("dealer packs") and send them out to
newsagents, toy shops, motorway service stations, just about anyone who would
take them. At that time (1984) the mainstream retailers refused to take budget
games because of bad experiences in the past, however Mastertronic eventually
won them over by showing that new games would regularly be produced to replace
old stock and by producing games that sold well. Another key figure at the time
was ex-Notts Cricket batsman Richard Bielby who ran a distribution network
servicing a large number of small retailers.
Compared
to its main competitors Mastertronic was a highly professional operation. The
management understood that sourcing games was relatively easy – marketing and
distribution was the hard part. All
the emphasis went on creating a brand image, establishing distributor chains,
persuading the larger high street stores to stock the product and ensuring a
fast turn-round from the tape duplicators and the printers so that fresh
supplies of successful games could be produced quickly.
In actual fact all the directors knew little about the games themselves,
they even used to boast that they never played them!
When programmers came in with demos, someone would have to set up the
machines, load the games and even plug in the joysticks for the directors.
Mastertronic also notably
pioneered the 'colour coding' for games by having a coloured triangle on the top
right hand corner of the front inlay and rectangles on the spine with the
catalogue number and format, for example Spectrum games were yellow, C64 were
red and Amstrad were orange. This led many software houses to use variations on
this theme but keep the colour coding so people could easily identify the
format, Mastertronic for a time went one step further and their 199 Range had
the cassette boxes coloured the same.
Much
of the early output was supplied by just two producers - the Darling brothers
who of course formed Codemasters as soon as they could break their contract with
the company, and Mr Chip Software who continued to do games for Mastertronic for
some time. Mastertronic
never employed in-house programmers to write games, everything published was
produced either by other software houses or by freelance authors. This was in
contrast to many of the company’s rivals. It was an ideal approach for the
fast output of many diverse games, this was a time when thousands of bedroom
programmers were trying to get rich quickly by writing games, not so good for
creating a consistent throughput of a series or for developing highly complex
games. One huge advantage was that it kept overheads low and outsourced the
risks of software development to others. Mastertronic did employ specialists to
review and test games, to encourage and assist authors and to provide technical
expertise. As well as permanent staff temporary assistance came from several of
game authors - including Nigel Johnstone, Richard Aplin, Stephen Curtis and Tony
Takoushi though they rarely stayed long, preferring to further their freelance
careers.
In
late 1985 Mastertronic launched their MAD label, this stood for 'Mastertronic's
Added Dimension' and meant that they could sell these games at a slightly
increased price (£2.99). The first ever MAD game was 'The Last V8' and many
more were soon to follow
One
of Mastertronic’s key markets was the Commodore 64, a machine renowned for its
musical capabilities. The famed C64 composer Rob Hubbard produced some classics
for the company’s C64 range such as One
Man and his Droid, Hunter Patrol, Spellbound, Phantoms of the Asteroid and Master
of Magic. These are still regarded by many enthusiasts as classics and
having music of this quality on budget-priced games greatly enhanced
Mastertronic’s reputation. However
because the actual profit per unit sold was small the company could not afford
to waste money so the company did not advertise anything like as much as
full-price software houses. In the
opinion of Anthony Guter, this led to some resentment from the games magazines
of the day, these problems may well have hampered more general coverage of the
software range.
Martin
Alper, who had the most marketing flair, went to the USA in 1986 to set up
Mastertronic Inc. The UK company was managed by Frank Herman, whilst Alan Sharam
increasingly specialised in sales and logistics (warehousing, packaging,
controlling production schedules). As the business continued to grow
Mastertronic created another label in 1986 - 'Entertainment USA', when
it began working closely with several American writers, including Sculptured
Software and Randall Masteller. They
wanted an outlet to sell games to the UK market, and so Mastertronic moved in,
often using Hubbard or Whittaker to re-do the music. Soon afterwards, this name
was used by Woolworths as the new name for their wholesale business.
In
1987 Mastertronic decided to expand their distribution of software and began
exporting titles back across the Atlantic, so the label "Bulldog" was
created primarily to distribute the 'Best of British' games in the US (The name Bulldog actually came from a small
wholesaler called Bulldog Distribution who got into financial difficulties and
was taken over the previous year). Several other labels were invented for other publishers who
wanted us to re-issue their old full price product at budget prices, such as
Rack-it for Hewson and Americana for US Gold. However the market for budget games started beginning to
decline sharply a typical game might sell 50,000 units in 1986 but only 15,000
in 1988 and 5000 in 1990. This was the impact of more competitors and many
companies dumping their previous full-price product.
Mastertronic
bought out Melbourne House when that label was struggling with financial
problems (Melbourne House kept its label identity) - this also meant that they
had first refusal on re-releases of games such as Way Of The Exploding Fist. And
so their re-release label 'Ricochet' was born. They pulled off a few major
re-releases at £1.99, most notably Crazy Comets and Impossible Mission but the
budget heyday was over
Having
bought Melbourne House and with heavy financial commitments to the Arcadia
project Mastertronic itself was now sufferering severe cash flow problems.
Virgin stepped and Richard Branson purchased the 45% of shares held by the
outside investment group. The remaining 55% was held by Alper (25%), Herman
(20%) and Sharam (10%) until 1988 when they sold out in a highly complex deal
which required their continuing involvement in the business and achievement of
profit and cashflow targets. The company was renamed the 'Mastertronic Group
Ltd', and later was merged with Virgin Games to create 'Virgin Mastertronic'.
Virgin had their own team of programmers and wrote many of their games in-house,
a major change to the way Mastertronic previously organised itself.
It
was Frank Herman who, in early 1987 spotted that Sega had no UK distributor for
the Master System range. Mastertronic sold all they could get that year and were
then appointed as distributors in France and Germany as well, and thus was Sega
Europe born. Branson undoubtedly wanted to buy Mastertronic in order to get into
the growing Sega business,
Soon
after the completion of the merger all the marketing effort went into full price
games under the Melbourne House label and it was clear that the budget side was
sliding into oblivion, the competition had become intense as everyone was
recycling their old full price games as budget games. Also the kids who used to
buy 8 bit computers were now buying Sega and Nintendo. Sega sales were booming
so much that nobody really cared about the traditional Mastertronic business,
staff recruitment actually rose, but all for the Sega operations and by 1991
nearly all the company's turnover, and certainly all the profit, came from Sega
business. As a result nearly all the staff moved over to Sega when they took
over the business from Virgin and
only a handful of games programmers stayed with the publishing side (quickly
renamed Virgin Interactive Entertainment).
After
the Sega takeover Frank became deputy Managing Director of Sega Europe and Alan
was Managing Director of Sega UK. Martin left the UK and became resident in the
US.
History based in large part on the experiences of Anthony Guter, a financial controller at Mastertronic 1985-1991
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