You will remember that some time ago we looked at the real big hitters in terms of sales of Mastertronic games here at the Mastertronic Collectors’ Archive, including some surprising sales on some formats. This included some useful insights into how each format did well (notably the Commodore 16 and Plus/4, relatively speaking) and how budget titles overall sold just under nineteen million games in all, which is no mean feat.
This time around, we are going to stray from the classic Mastertronic range and look at the different sub-labels and see how the sales statistics measured up there for the likes of Ricochet, Mastertronic’s Added Dimension (MAD), Bulldog and the Entertainment USA ranges. Our huge thanks as ever goes to Anthony Guter, whose meticulous record keeping as Financial Controller of Mastertronic made creating this article and interpreting the stats a lot easier along the way.
Ricochet Top 10
As we saw from the all time top 10 sellers, the Ricochet re-releases of Activision’s Ghostbusters on the Spectrum, Commodore 64 and Amstrad sold highly, and there is no surprise that for the Ricochet label, these are the top three positions and four out of the ten overall. Perhaps what is more surprising is what makes up the remainder of the top ten.
| Game | Format | Sales |
| Ghostbusters | ZX Spectrum | 168,626 |
| Ghostbusters | Commodore 64 | 147,108 |
| Ghostbusters | Amstrad | 97,188 |
| The Way of the Exploding Fist | ZX Spectrum | 63,564 |
| FA Cup Football | Spectrum / Amstrad | 59,224 |
| Knightmare | Spectrum / Amstrad | 59,013 |
| The Way of the Exploding Fist | Commodore 64 | 44,870 |
| Dan Dare | ZX Spectrum | 38,813 |
| Ghostbusters | Atari XL/XE | 36,913 |
| FA Cup Football | Commodore 64 | 35,419 |
Certainly, the later Ricochet releases being the “flippy” format with Spectrum on one side and Amstrad on the other certainly helped some of the titles sell well. Ghostbusters was also the only Ricochet label release for the Atari XL/XE machines too, but still had plenty of buyers there too. FA Cup Football clearly sold because of it being a football game, but was it any good? We will review that one in due course, so you can find out what we thought of it.
If we were to exclude the flippy releases from the list, and go single format only, the next two positions would be The Way of the Exploding Fist (Amstrad, 35,301) and Knightmare (Commodore 64, 34,357) – but what of the Commodore 16 and Plus/4, I hear you ask? Well, only The Way of the Exploding Fist had release on the Ricochet label, and that would have been thirteenth overall (33,301)
Ricochet Top Sellers by Format
Starting with the ZX Spectrum, the top ten proved just how much the sales tapered off for some of the Ricochet releases. Three of the re-releases of Martech games are all grouped together in the top ten here, along with some Ultimate titles at the end.
| Game | Sales |
| Ghostbusters | 168,626 |
| The Way of the Exploding Fist | 63,564 |
| Dan Dare | 38,813 |
| Aliens | 22,226 |
| Knucklebusters | 18,210 |
| Eddie Kidd’s Jump Challenge | 17,347 |
| Geoff Capes Strongman | 15,983 |
| Brian Jacks Superstar Challenge | 14,794 |
| Jet Pac | 12,794 |
| Knightlore | 9,294 |
And a similar story for the top ten for Commodore 64, but with very different titles further down including some only for that format including Tau Ceti. One surprise is that Impossible Mission did not sell as many on re-release as you would think, and despite being a bona fide Commodore 64 classic. Skate Rock was one I personally enjoyed at full price and at budget price, if I did not own it already, I would have purchased – and skateboarding was still very popular during the late 1980s. Little Computer People is best played on disk I have to say – the cassette version is cut down but still must have been enjoyable enough to try out.
| Game | Sales |
| Ghostbusters | 147,108 |
| The Way of the Exploding Fist | 44,870 |
| FA Cup Football | 35,419 |
| Knightmare | 34,357 |
| Aliens | 31,734 |
| Dan Dare | 29,094 |
| Tau Ceti | 24,059 |
| Impossible Mission | 18,036 |
| Skate Rock | 17,181 |
| Little Computer People | 15,832 |
A very different top ten for the Amstrad as well, with Skate Rock featuring higher up the sales chart, a raft of Ultimate titles at the end, like the Spectrum, and both the World’s Strongest Man and one of the best contestants on The Superstars having their games fare well here.
| Game | Sales |
| Ghostbusters | 97,188 |
| The Way of the Exploding Fist | 35,301 |
| Dan Dare | 20,990 |
| Aliens | 17,809 |
| Skate Rock | 16,738 |
| Brian Jacks Superstar Challenge | 10,783 |
| Geoff Capes Strongman | 9,999 |
| Alien 8 | 7,850 |
| Knightlore | 6,374 |
| Sabre Wulf | 6,091 |
Because a lot of the later Ricochet games were the flippy releases, which had ZX Spectrum on one side and Amstrad on the other, that deserves its own chart – although only the top five this time:
| Game | Sales |
| FA Cup Football | 59,224 |
| Knightmare | 59,013 |
| Jet Set Willy | 31,986 |
| Dan Dare 2 | 20,613 |
| Impossible Mission | 18,816 |
Impossible Mission only sold 780 copies more on the flippy format than on the Commodore 64, interestingly. However, having the flippy format did mean that potentially production costs were less, and so if some of those games were not selling so well, it sort of made sense – albeit with one less chance for the game to load in some cases.
There were enough Ricochet releases for the BBC Micro to have its own top five too:
| Game | Sales |
| Eddie Kidd’s Jump Challenge | 8,082 |
| Geoff Capes Strongman | 7,707 |
| Brian Jacks Superstar Challenge | 7,560 |
| Gisburne’s Castle | 6,544 |
| Jet Pac | 5,620 |
All three of the Martech games feature at the top, and an exclusive BBC only game as well, which was good to see. The BBC also has the lowest selling 8-bit game on the Ricochet label, Alien 8, but we will come to lowest sellers in a future article. Other 8-bit formats did not have enough Ricochet label releases to warrant their own chart – only one as mentioned for the Commodore 16 and Plus/4, two for the MSX and one for the Atari XL/XE series.
continues…
Leave a Reply