Running a website like the Mastertronic Collectors Archive is no small task. Even with the strong and passionate team that we have working hard to bring you this site, it’s still an exhausting job putting this site together. While it may not seem as if we’re creating a lot of new content each week when you read our weekly updates, we’re constantly updating and researching our checklists, planning and writing game reviews, and working on schedules for reviews and features weeks if not months in advance… and that’s before we talk about the other websites we run or our YouTube channel!
But with the huge range of games that our site covers – from Mastertronic and all of their sub-labels, the modern releases under the Mastertronic Group, early titles from Melbourne House and Virgin Games, and everything released under Virgin Mastertronic, not to mention international re-releases through companies such as DroSoft – it means that we are looking at potentially thousands of games waiting to be reviewed. And frankly this is going to need a lot of time and we feel that it’s time we expanded our team to make it happen.
What We Need
We’re looking for help across a range of areas to help with the site. As regular site visitors (we hope!), you will see that the bulk of the content we have on the site are game reviews and that’s where we will need assistance the most and we want to bring more people on board to assist with this. But we don’t just want to limit our team to focus there.
- Game Reviews – review coverage across a range of 8-bit and 16 bit systems covering the original Mastertronic range and their sub-labels, the releases from Melbourne House and Virgin Games/Virgin Mastertronic and all of the releases from the Mastertronic Group including all their PC games released directly and the Sold Out label and their console titles including those under the Blast range. There are thousands we haven’t covered yet which is why we need more help!
- Articles – we’re always looking to add one-off articles or short series to compliment the reviews covering anything Mastertronic related. We’re open to ideas on pretty much any subject!
- Research – additional help improving our checklsts, and features on the site and finding out more information or news that might be of interest for our readers. We also know our Press Index is missing a lot of media coverage that Mastertronic had over the years so there’s scope for us to expand that area.
- Interviews – we haven’t published any interviews on the site yet, but we are keen to start this talking to as many former developers as we can so we would need help not only conducting them but working with our existing team planning them and reaching out to people.
- YouTube – we’re trying to create more Mastertronic videos for our YouTube channel and again many of these are a team effort. Either behind the scenes in a planning stage, or working on scripting, images, capturing footage or even recording voiceovers.
- Anything Else! – As a team, we’re always open to ideas and suggestions for anything to improve the site for our readers and we have an active team-only Discord where we discuss and plan the site daily.
What You Need
First and foremost you need a passion for gaming, especially titles released by Mastertronic and their spin off labels. If you’re not a fan of the original 8-bit range from the 80s to early 90s this isn’t essential as we’re still looking for people able to help out with coverage of the 16-bit releases from Virgin Mastertronic, as well as the console and PC releases from the Mastertronic Group which covers hundreds of titles.
We do have people on our team who already specialise in some platforms, so it would help if you’re a fan of multiple computers so we can cover as many systems as possible and have as deep a team as we can.
From the writing side, a basic grasp of the English language is obviously important. Beyond that, all you need to do in terms of writing is to send content in to us in Word format and use any emulator to get screenshots for us to accompany any reviews you might send. While the site is created using WordPress, we have templates that we use to make things as easy as possible for all our writers so I handle all the final editing at this end to keep things running as smoothly as possible!
What We Offer
Unfortunately, as the Mastertronic Collectors Archive is run in our spare time we’re not able to afford to pay anyone for working on our projects. What little income we have received from advertising has been put straight back into covering our hosting costs. However, as I’ve said earlier we do run several other websites and these do cover a lot of other video game content – both modern and retro and this is where we do feel we can offer something to those of you who do get involved…
Our primary geek website – www.infinitefrontiers.org.uk – covers all manner of sci-fi, fantasy, and gaming across a wide range of formats and we are offerred review codes DAILY for games across a range of formats (PC, PS4/5, XBox, and Switch). I am in a position of having to turn down almost all of these as I don’t have time to work on all four of our sites, our YouTube channel and deal with everything in my personal life.
However I am in a position to share these review codes with people who join our team as long as you are able to review them for us. With us receiving a wide range of games from small indies to major releases there should be plenty of titles available for everyone!
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So if you think you fit the bill and want to be a part of our growing team, get in touch with us using our Contact Form and we’ll be in touch as quickly as we can!
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