Mastertronic - Influence On The Industry

Influence On The Industry

Compared to its main competitors, Mastertronic was a highly professional operation. The management understood that sourcing games was relatively easy while marketing and distribution was the hard part. Emphasis was set 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.

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 ZX Spectrum games were yellow, Commodore 64 were red, Amstrad were orange and MSX were white. 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. The US releases pioneered the plastic DVD-style cases now common among computer and console games.

Much of the early output was supplied by just two producers: The Darling brothers, who formed Codemasters as soon as they could break their contract with the company, and Mr. Chip Software who continued to write games for Mastertronic for some time. Mastertronic never employed in-house programmers to write games. Everything that was published had been produced either by other software houses or by freelance authors. This was an ideal approach for the fast output of many diverse games. At this time thousands of bedroom programmers were trying to get rich quickly by writing games. While this was 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 N Curtis and Tony Takoushi.

One of Mastertronic's key markets was the Commodore 64. The famed C64 composer Rob Hubbard produced some classic music for the company's C64 range such as One Man and his Droid, Hunter Patrol, Spellbound, Action Biker, 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 advertise as much as full-price software houses. In the opinion of Anthony Guter, this led to some resentment from the game magazines of the day, these problems may well have hampered more general coverage of the software range.