A History Of Mastertronic

Masterwhat?

Why was it called Mastertronic? As part of a general marketing plan in which the word Master was going to be used with lots of other words. I think in the very early days it was intended to distribute various electrical products but only the computer games were successful.

The company briefly published records under the name Mastersound and videos as Mastervision. These were not particularly succesful ventures. They also used MasterAdventurer for those games that fell under the “adventure” category. This was partly due to early dealings with Carnell Software to publish an elaborate adventure game for the Spectrum called Wrath of Magra. Carnell Software was in financial difficulties and ceased trading in the summer of 1984. Two of their titles were republished, Volcanic Dungeon and Black Crystal.

The computer games market in the UK in 1983

The first computer games boom was based on the Atari consoles. This collapsed around 1982/3 but the new generation of cheap programmable computers was emerging. This was led in the UK by Sinclair products (the ZX80 / 81/ Spectrum range) with fierce competition from Commodore’s Vic and C64. The retail end was poorly organised. Console games had been sold by a variety of outlets typically electrical stores, photographic shops and some of the high street chains. These pulled out of the market. Mail order was popular for consumers living away from town centres. But in a town centre where did one go for a computer game? There were virtually no specialist games shops. Were games toys, or published products like books and records, or did they rightly belong with consumer electronics alongside the computers on which they ran? There was no obvious answer to this question.

What was certain is that the trade was in disarray. The failure of the first consoles made retailers suspicious. The buyers for the large high street chains of which Boots, WH Smith and Woolworths were leaders, were confused by the different sorts of home computer. They did not know how to cope with suppliers that might produce a good game one month and then nothing but failures thereafter. They were afraid to commit to buying product unless they could be sure of returning it for a refund, but who knew how long the new games publishers would be in business? And how did you sell a computer game anyway? A customer could flip through a book, listen to a record, pick up a toy. Games were slow to load and needed some understanding which counter staff lacked. It seemed crazy to put a tape into a computer, wait five minutes for it to load and then watch the potential customer play with it for ten minutes before deciding not to buy. Retailers were not persuaded that there was any profit in the business.

Mastertronic’s strategy

Mastertronic was started by men who understood distribution and marketing. They knew nothing about computer games and were proud to boast1 that they never played them (but this is no different to the heads of large record companies who never hear the music of their stars). When programmers came in with demos, someone would have to setup the machines, load the games and even plug in the joysticks for the directors. Mastertronic never employed programmers directly (unlike Virgin Games who at the time of the merger had a programming staff of 6, with several others on special projects). Everything was bought in from outside, either directly from the authors or from other games publishers. Once established, the company was deluged with games from enthusiastic amateurs and managed to publish quite a few of them.

Before the company started trading, the business strategy had been defined. The separate elements were each vital to success. These were distribution, sourcing and pricing.

Distribution – the key

Mastertronic’s founders had backgrounds in video distribution, another boom/bust trade and used their contacts to set up distribution to retailers. At the beginning the high street chains were not interested. But because the games were cheap it was easy to persuade small retailers to take them. Richard Bielby has said that there was a “gentleman’s agreement” between himself and Frank for Richard to handle all the independent retailers – it would be typical of Herman that such an understanding was informal and based on a handshake – and he and his wife kept in touch with dozens of shops and traders, bought in bulk from Mastertronic and broke the stock into manageable units for their sub-distributors and merchandisers. Many had experience of the video distribution business, now rapidly consolidating as big high street operators took over. They were glad to switch to computer games which were, as Bielby says “… a nice extra line to sell during the quieter summer months”.

The Mastertronic team found customers in newsagents, sweetshops and garages, video shops and groceries, even motorway service stations. Shops were encouraged to take “dealer packs”, 100 games at a time mounted on cardboard racks. They were asked just to give the products some space. Sale or exchange agreements meant they undertook no risk.

Martin Alper seen with a dealer pack on its cardboard stand. This photo, from the Venturebeat obituary to Martin, is attributed to “Virgin” but was originally published in Popular Computing Weekly, 19 July 1984, where it illustrated a fascinating interview. The framed picture on the wall is the cover artwork for Spectipede.

Cracking the high street chains was much harder than local newsagents. The nervousness of the retail trade about the continuity of computer games product was profound. Buyers did not want to rely on publishers who might not deliver new product on time. They wanted the same sort of assurances that the long established record and book publishers could supply, with guaranteed releases of new titles and buyback arrangements for overstocks. Mastertronic set out to provide these assurances. While other publishers based their marketing strategy on the output of one or two key programmers, Mastertronic cast its net wide and aimed to have a constant flow of new titles. By June the range was in HMV, then one of the major record retailers in the UK, but a constant complaint of readers to games magazines was that Mastertronic games were hard to find. Even in 1986 they seemed elusive. Sharam was heavily involved in the campaign to reach the big stores and the author was in his company when Woolworth’s, in a stunning reversal of attitude, requested our help in stocking and selecting software. He was virtually rubbing his hands with glee.

Unlike its competitors Mastertronic did not entrust the storage and distribution of its products to wholesalers. Determined to control the distribution process, the directors set up their own warehouse. In the early days this was a cellar in Paul Street in the unfashionable part of the City of London, run by Ken Dye. It is almost certain that Sharam selected the premises himself with his own knowledge of the property market and he closely supervised its day to day running.

Modern day Paul Street, looking towards where the warehouse used to be (in a cellar on the left). The office block where Mastertronic was based between 1985 and 1988, a few yards the other way down the street, has been demolished.

Although most of the employees in the Paul Street warehouse were casual labourers, to take on the overheads of a warehouse was a bold step, one which very few publishers would ever do. But for Mastertronic, the key was to keep promises about delivery. No publisher working through a wholesaler could guarantee when products would be issued. A customer buying from Mastertronic could, if he wished, go to the warehouse and collect his goods there and then. Running the warehouse kept the directors in touch with the physical side of the business. They were forced to understand how to pack games, what sorts of packaging broke in transit, what sort of labelling was required by retailers, and every aspect of distribution.

Mastertronic also notably pioneered the “colour coding” for games by having a coloured triangle on the top right hand corner of the front and rectangles on the inlay spine with the catalogue number and format:, Spectrum games were yellow, C64 were red and Amstrad were orange. This led many software houses to use variations on this theme but keep the colour coding so people could easily identify the format. Retailers, who understood very little about computer games, liked this system and it enhanced the professional image of the company.

continues…

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1 Comment

  1. Neil from the RetroManCave/Retro Collective on Youtube now owns the Mastertronic trademark and is planning to release a load of budget games using it. Its mentioned on their latest update video.

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