Mastertronic

» see mastertronic.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

The Mastertronic idea needed a newsagent, and that is the part of it that does not travel. In Britain in 1984 there was a shop on every high street selling newspapers next to a spinner rack of tapes, and Mastertronic put games on that rack for a pound ninety nine. Turkey had no equivalent shelf. Software here moved through copied cassettes and later through unlabeled discs, at a price of roughly nothing, so the thing Mastertronic invented was already the default in my part of the world before the company existed.

It was set up in London in 1983 by Martin Alper and Frank Herman, with Terry Medway and Alan Sharam, and the first titles went on sale on 2 April 1984. The pricing was the whole argument. A full price game was around ten pounds. Mastertronic sold at a fifth of that and made the margin back on a distribution network that reached people who would never walk into a computer dealer. Kikstart and Finders Keepers moved in numbers that embarrassed publishers with better games.

The quality was uneven and the company was honest enough about that in its own way, splitting off a slightly more expensive label called M.A.D. in late 1985 at two ninety nine for the ones worth more. Virgin bought forty five percent of the shares from outside investors, and the founders sold their remaining stake in 1988 in a deal that kept them working there anyway.

Then the business quietly became something else. Frank Herman noticed in early 1987 that Sega had no proper distribution in the United Kingdom and got Virgin Mastertronic the contract. By 1991 nearly all the turnover and effectively all the profit came from selling Sega machines rather than from selling cheap tapes. Sega bought the distribution arm that year and renamed it Sega Europe, most of the staff transferred, and the original Mastertronic stopped existing without anybody publishing an obituary for it.

~ the record ~

~ the second company ~

Frank Herman spent 2003 negotiating to buy the name back from Sega, and in 2004 Mastertronic Group Limited was formed out of a merger between The Producers and Sold Out Sales & Marketing. Andy Payne ran it. Legally it had nothing to do with the 1983 company beyond the trademark, but the instinct was the same one: find the cheap end of the market and own it.

It ended up as five businesses under one roof. Sold Out put five pound boxed games into supermarkets while Just Flight and Just Trains sold add-ons to people who take flight simulators seriously. Blast! Entertainment did licensed console titles. Behind them sat The Producers doing the manufacturing and Get Games running a digital storefront. In the last few years the group also became a genuine indie publisher, putting out Sublevel Zero and Tango Fiesta, which is the part of its record most likely to have crossed my screen without me ever reading the publisher line.

~ how it actually ended ~

It was not the market. Mastertronic had already been through a company voluntary arrangement in July 2014 that cost around forty percent of the staff, and it had signed an investment deal in February 2015 with a Bahrain and Qatar based group that would have bought out the majority Dutch shareholder and refinanced the company. The investors did not honor the contract. Payne said so directly and without much diplomacy at the time. The contract was signed and the money never arrived, and by then the games committed to on the strength of it had already been paid for.

Administrators were appointed on 27 November 2015. What was left of the group was cut back to the flight and train simulation business, and Payne stepped away. Sold Out survived as a separate company and was sold to Toadman Interactive in November 2019 for sixteen million pounds. It trades under another name entirely now. The pound ninety nine spinner rack was gone thirty years before any of that.

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