A History Of Mastertronic

31 January 2025 Anthony Guter Articles, History 3

International growth

The early success of the first batch of games in the UK encouraged Mastertronic to exhibit at the summer CES show in Chicago in 1984. A partnership with Classic Family Entertainment, based in California, created a joint venture called Mastertronic Inc. Although the man named as president, Sidney Niekerk, had links to Herman’s video business (and therefore they presumably knew each other well) the joint venture did not last very long because in 1985 Mastertronic Inc, commenced production of disk-based software at a facility in Frederick, Maryland.This company was owned 80% by Mastertronic and 20% by the owner of the factory, Gary Snyder6. A few pictures of the company’s production facility are available here.

In 1986 Martin Alper, who had the most marketing flair, moved to California and established the software design and sourcing arm of the business in Costa Mesa, in the suburbs of Los Angeles, though production continued in Maryland for many years. Mastertronic Inc could only distribute C64 games at the start because all the other 8 bit computers were virtually unknown in the USA. Gradually Alper introduced games for the new 16 bit machines and Mastertronic Inc began to take on a different profile to the UK based business. Links with US software houses provided a new source of games and the label “Entertainment USA” was created to showcase these in Europe. This was balanced by another label, Bulldog (“Best of British”), which took its name from a customer (a subsidary of Melbourne House) acquired when they were on the verge of going bust.
Gary Snyder


The business centre at Costa Mesa where Mastertronic Inc relocated. A bit nicer than Paul Street.

Herman also found exclusive distributors in the major European markets and thus created the impression of a truly international group. Mastertronic SA and Mastertronic GmbH were formed in France and Germany respectively, Mastertronic owning 51% of the shares in each with the local distributor keeping 49%. (The registration of the name in France faced obstruction from the literal minded authorities who protested that the word was neither a real name nor that of a product and was therefore unacceptable). Oddly, the men running the three main European distributors were all British; Cameron MacSween in France, John Kellas in Germany and John Holder in Italy (This latter was never owned by Mastertronic). Personal relationships struck at computer shows brought these arrangements into being.

The UK company was now managed by Herman, whilst Sharam increasingly specialised in sales and logistics (warehousing, packaging, controlling production schedules).
Alan Sharam

In the late summer of 1986, Mastertronic recruited Geoff Heath as Director of Marketing. Geoff had run both Activision and latterly Melbourne House. He was a heavyweight in the games industry and his appointment marked a step up in Mastertronic’s internal development. His long term target was to bring the company into full price software.

16 bit computers became popular and for the first time the quality of games for the home machines, such as the Amiga and Atari ST, seemed similar to those in arcade machines. The 16 bit range was launched, somewhat belatedly, on a new label called 16-Blitz although the name was not used for very long. There was even a range of games for the IBM PC and its many clones; using these machines for games was commonplace in the USA but a novelty in the UK.

Geoff Heath (on phone) with Alan Sharam perched on desk in a meeting with an unidentified person. A rare picture showing the reality of the Paul Street offices (apologies for poor quality of this scan from a b&w original).

Mastertronic Inc began to develop a range of new arcade games that would run equally well on home computers. The company agreed to buy a large number of Amiga chips from Commodore to power the new arcade machines. This venture, called Arcadia, nearly killed the company because the project developed slowly and the games were poor quality and not well suited for arcades. This demonstrated a weakness in the setup – any games player could have explained that a home computer game is fundamentally different in design to an arcade game. But nobody asked games players. However, the name Arcadia was used in the USA in preference to Melbourne House. The flourishing state of the Amiga market meant that Commodore did not enforce the contract, fortunately.

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