Ricochet was the first budget re-release label to be launched by Mastertronic. It featured games licensed primarily from Martech, Activision, and Melbourne House.
The later games in the range (30 onwards) featured “Flippy” cassettes for the Spectrum and Amstrad. These had both formats on a single cassette, presumably to save production costs.
Numbering
Numbering format for the Ricochet range has a two letter prefix plus the numbers in the table above. The letters represent the platform the game is released on. These are: RC (Commodore 64), RC2 (Commodore 16), RS (ZX Spectrum), RA (Amstrad), RB (BBC/Electron), RSA or RAS (Spectrum/Amstrad Flippy), RT (Atari, Atari ST), RX (MSX), RM (Amiga).
Missing Games
There are four gaps in the full list where we are unable to officially identify games in the range, although this list is in fact complete. As with most Mastertronic ranges, there are gaps in the lists which we assume are cancelled titles or simply discrepancies in the numbering system. However, we believe that we have now been able to identify all four of these missing games through some careful digging…
Mastertronic released a number of catalogues with details of upcoming releases, many of which mentioned upcoming titles for the Ricochet range that are not listed here. Three of these “missing games” are Transformers, Past Finder and Fighting Warrior. Each title subsequently ended up in the main range but it is notable that all of these are re-releases from companies that Mastertronic licensed games from for the Ricochet label. In addition, copies of both Transformers and Past Finder have been seen “in the wild” featuring Ricochet branded cassettes.
The fourth and final title was discovered accidentally. Camelot Warriors – also in the main Mastertronic range – has been found both for sale online and in many collections sporting both Mastertronic and Ricochet labels on the cassette. Originally released by Dinamic this also fits the pattern for games that would have been released as part of the range.
Unfortunately, the release order for the Ricochet range was somewhat erratic and titles were released out of sequence so unfortunately there is no way for us to identify which games were released to match the corresponding numbers in the list above. While this is frustrating from a collector’s viewpoint, at least we can now close the door on what has been a mystery for fans for a long time.
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