Bulldog – The Best of British, What About the Best of Sales?
Another Mastertronic label offshoot was of course Bulldog, labelled The Best of British, having a bulldog on the front cover and with mainly blue coloured packaging. The catalogue numbers started with B initially (such as BC for Commodore 64, BS for Spectrum etc), which make them at least a little easier to recognise from the main Mastertronic range for the most part. For some odd reason, Destructo on the Commodore 64 has a standard range IC number instead of BC!
The top ten selling games on this label are dominated by Feud and Destructo (or to give it its full title, The Island of Dr. Destructo.) All five main formats that Feud was released on under the Bulldog label feature here, which was probably on the back of the favourable reviews of the Spectrum version. Understandable, but I wonder how many Commodore 64 owners ended up so disappointed that their version was so full of bugs?
| Game | Format | Sales |
| Feud | ZX Spectrum | 67,184 |
| Feud | Amstrad | 42,195 |
| Feud | Commodore 64 | 39,356 |
| Destructo | ZX Spectrum | 26,831 |
| Destructo | Commodore 64 | 23,523 |
| Feud | Atari XL/XE | 22,760 |
| Destructo | Amstrad | 22,040 |
| Feud | MSX | 19,886 |
| Colony | Atari XL/XE | 19,154 |
| Streaker | ZX Spectrum | 19,008 |
In fact, only Colony and Streaker get a look in the top ten, with it being the best-selling Bulldog game for the Atari XL/XE (and the best selling of the five formats the game was released on, which is a major surprise.)
Only twelve games were released on the Bulldog label, and only the Spectrum had all twelve games released on that format.
Bulldog Top Sellers by Format
As for a top five for each of the major formats, we can start with the Spectrum first:
| Game | Sales |
| Feud | 67,184 |
| Destructo | 26,831 |
| Streaker | 19,008 |
| Rigel’s Revenge | 17,827 |
| Wolfan | 17,147 |
Feud sold more than the next three put together, which is an impressive achievement. The fact it was also the first Bulldog release may have helped somewhat. In fifth place is Wolfan, which was unique for the Bulldog series in that it was only released on the Spectrum.
As second place in overall sales went to the Amstrad version of Feud, we can see what else sold well in the top five:
| Game | Sales |
| Feud | 42,195 |
| Destructo | 22,040 |
| Jackle and Wide | 16,824 |
| Rigel’s Revenge | 13,664 |
| Colony | 12,779 |
Jackle and Wide did well on this format, as did the excellent graphic adventure Rigel’s Revenge, which was rightfully praised in the magazines at the time. Colony just scrapes into the top five here and was an intriguing strategy game that did unfortunately not port well to all the systems it was released on.
For the Commodore 64, the top five looks like this:
| Game | Sales |
| Feud | 39,356 |
| Destructo | 23,523 |
| Invasion | 18,951 |
| Colony | 14,372 |
| Rigel’s Revenge | 13,751 |
Surprisingly, Invasion makes the top five here – and I say that because the game is a strategy game that does take some time to get used to and to work out what to do. There were also hardly magazine reviews for this either, so it was a case of suck it and see, and those that do persevere may have enjoyed this a fair bit.
The MSX was well supported on this label with five of the games being released – enough to make a chart:
| Game | Sales |
| Feud | 19,886 |
| Colony | 12,801 |
| Jackle and Wide | 10,491 |
| Invasion | 9,311 |
| Streaker | 8,145 |
I suspect in several cases the games were easier to port if the original versions were Z80 coded, and as a fair number of them were, this led to decent support all round. The sales for Feud would have been more than only two Commodore 64 games, with the rest being relatively good compared to how less well used the MSX format was – I suspect European sales may have helped here too.
As for the other 8-bit formats, the Commodore 16 and Plus/4 only had Spore released, but that sold 15,275, the most for any format for that game. Apart from Feud and Colony, the Atari XL/XE series also had Invasion, which sold 12,871 – making a total of three games for that system on the Bulldog label.
continues…
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