Americana was one of the more unusual of Mastertronic’s labels. Publisher US Gold approached Mastertronic asking them to assist them in setting up a budget range for them as they had little experience in the budget market. An agreement was reached and Americana was launched. Early releases were distributed by US Gold themselves from their offices in Birmingham, with the final run of titles being distributed by Mastertronic themselves from their base in London.
Because of this conflicting information on advertising and packaging, it has lead to confusion over who actually owned and operated the label, and the changeover in distribution coincides with the release of Go For The Gold which has two different covers. Collectors generally consider the entire range to be part of the wider Mastertronic collection for ease of record keeping, and as such we are presenting the full list here.
Eventually, the Americana label was closed down and replaced by US Gold with KIXX. For ease of reading, because of the size of the range we have split it below by format.
Updated: 18th February 2024
BBC B / Electron
| Title | Author | Original Publisher | Format | Cover Art |
| Beach Head | US Gold | BBC/Electron |  |
|
| Beach Head II | BBC/Electron |  |
||
| Bounty Bob Strikes Back | BBC |  |
||
| Questprobe featuring The Hulk | Scott Adams | Adventure International | BBC |  |
| Questprobe featuring The Hulk | Scott Adams | Adventure International | Electron |  |
| Questprobe: Spider-Man | Scott Adams | Adventure International | BBC |  |
| Raid Over Moscow | BBC/Electron |  |
Commodore 16
| Title | Author | Original Publisher | Cover Art |
| Beach Head | US Gold |  |
|
| Dizasterblaster | Shaun Southern |  |
|
| Questprobe featuring The Hulk | Scott Adams | Adventure International |  |
| Questprobe: Spider-Man | Scott Adams | Adventure International |  |
| Robo Knight | Peter J Bartlett |  |
Notes
We will be expanding this checklist over time with more formats, cover art and links to reviews.
It’s the other way round. The 1986 titles are US Gold with the 501344 barcode prefix then Mastertronic take over for the 1987/8 titles with their usual 501296* barcode and introduce the AS/AC/AA numbers.
Americana is a strange label, in a way somewhat similar to Rack-It, and as well as updating the checklist we’ll be revising the historical aspect of this list. It’s a difficult one to get all of the information as US Gold themselves rarely acknowleged Mastertronic’s involvement. We’ve double-checked a lot of our own information and Go For The Gold is definitely the transitional title, but the consensus still seems to be the case that KIXX is US Gold’s first solo budget label. We’ll probably cover this in more depth in a separate article and just briefly mention it here instead.
Go For The Gold is the only title to appear in both ranges. It’s not the point the transition occurs, but it was by far the most successful Americana release becoming the Gallup All Formats no 1 in September 1986. Karate Champ seems to be the last US Gold release which appears in the C64 chart around March 87 (although Zzap64 don’t get round to reviewing it until their July issue).
Popular Computing Weekly covers the Mastertronic “distribution contract” in the 7th August 1987 issue. It’s also covered by Your Commodore in the Dec 87 issue and the Jan 88 issue of Danish magazine Soft who both list The Dam Busters and Fight Night as forthcoming Americana releases, although curiously they end up on the relaunched Power House label in early 1988.