Looks to be a site commemorating the Mastertronic range - I'm all for things celebrating the era we all enjoy
I have humbly offered my services to supply some Speccy mastertronic information, as they seem to be lacking a Speccy presence - not that I know much apart from what I've collected...
New here - just found out about the forum/site after following a link back from the Mastertronic Collectors Archive. I'm the Site Editor / founder over there and just wanted to thank everyone for their interest in the site so far.
Anyone who wants to get involved and help out, just drop us a message using the Contact Form and I'll get back to everyone as quickly as I can. We're always on the lookout for people to help out with writing, research and more. We've got big plans for the site, especially with the scope that Mastertronic has covered over the last 40 years.
Bit of background to the site. Anthony Guter, Mastertronic's former Financial Director, had been running a site detailling the history of the company for about a decade but he's been in a position for about a year of having to either close his site down completely or face much higher running costs thanks to some changes his hosting company was trying to force onto him. As I'd been running a Mastertronic Facebook Group for a while with almost 1,000 members (for fans fans, former staff and developers) he asked me if I wanted to take over his site.
After talking things through and some brainstorming, the plan came together to not just transfer Anthony's site over to a new home, but to revamp it and build a new site around it adding more content - checklists, articles, reviews, interviews and more. I started putting a team together of experts I knew from my group who each had different expertise and collected different systems or were as obsessed as I was collecting everything and we launched last year.
We've still got part of Anthony's site to port over as there were hundreds of pages to move manually, but we're adding new content several times a week. The Spectrum side of things is one area I do want to expand on a lot more (I've been tracking all our reviews to try to get a better balance between formats) so I know where we need to work more.
I'm always open to ideas for new content, able to answer any questions and eager to listen to any suggestions as well.
SimonPlumbe wrote: ↑Tue Apr 23, 2024 10:52 pm
Hi guys,
New here - just found out about the forum/site after following a link back from the Mastertronic Collectors Archive. I'm the Site Editor / founder over there and just wanted to thank everyone for their interest in the site so far.
Anyone who wants to get involved and help out, just drop us a message using the Contact Form and I'll get back to everyone as quickly as I can. We're always on the lookout for people to help out with writing, research and more. We've got big plans for the site, especially with the scope that Mastertronic has covered over the last 40 years.
Bit of background to the site. Anthony Guter, Mastertronic's former Financial Director, had been running a site detailling the history of the company for about a decade but he's been in a position for about a year of having to either close his site down completely or face much higher running costs thanks to some changes his hosting company was trying to force onto him. As I'd been running a Mastertronic Facebook Group for a while with almost 1,000 members (for fans fans, former staff and developers) he asked me if I wanted to take over his site.
After talking things through and some brainstorming, the plan came together to not just transfer Anthony's site over to a new home, but to revamp it and build a new site around it adding more content - checklists, articles, reviews, interviews and more. I started putting a team together of experts I knew from my group who each had different expertise and collected different systems or were as obsessed as I was collecting everything and we launched last year.
We've still got part of Anthony's site to port over as there were hundreds of pages to move manually, but we're adding new content several times a week. The Spectrum side of things is one area I do want to expand on a lot more (I've been tracking all our reviews to try to get a better balance between formats) so I know where we need to work more.
I'm always open to ideas for new content, able to answer any questions and eager to listen to any suggestions as well.
Glad you enjoyed it. I'm hoping to get started on the Spectrum checklist soon but it's going to be a bit daunting as it's likely to be one of the largest on the site so we'll probably take the same approach we have with the others and post it in stages, updating it gradually. It may take longer, but at least that way we can get something live sooner rather than later!
Adding a full listing with author credits, sales figures, cover art and everything otherwise would take months if not longer to compile even with our existing records that we've got so I'd rather get something up that gets something up!
I'm also hoping to get more Spectrum reviews up from next week onwards so stay tuned!
Please bear with us on this one as it's going to be massive! Eventually we're aiming to cover every one of Mastertronic's labels, with sales figures, author credits, cover art and links to reviews once we have those on the site as well so it will be as comprehensive as we can possibly make it. Right now we've just got three ranges covered but we will add more soon.
The plan when it comes to tackling the main "310 range" will probably be to add it in chunks as we'll have to spread it to around 50 titles per page to keep things readable. Hopefully we'll aim to have a big update every couple of weeks or so and then make revisions as we need to.
Really interesting site! Did anyone not buy the re-release of Ghostbusters?
And I'm surprised some of the Ultimate games and (in particular) Starquake sold so poorly - although I suppose for parents/grandparents looking for £2 stocking fillers, the quality of the game doesn't matter as much as whether they'd heard of it in the first place, hence the relative popularity of Ghostbusters, the Martech tie-in sports sims and that FA Cup game.
For something like Jet Pac (and the other Ultimate titles as well), I'd say they sold so well first time around that Mastertronic produced them in smaller quantities as they didn't expect them to be big sellers with everyone already owning them. I didn't own a Spectrum until much later in life starting off with Commodore systems, but it was seeing Jet Pac on a friend's Spectrum that got me to rush out and get it on the Vic the instant I saw it.
Ghostbusters, on the other hand, was one of those games that people probably bought as a known brand and who may have missed it first time around. Mastertronic released in in January 1988 so it would have caught the new wave of Spectrum owners who had got one that Christmas so it was pretty good timing release wise. One thing that is interesting with a lot of their games is seeing how sales vary across formats and the changes with release dates as well. The move to flippy releases later on definitely helped as Amstrad and Spectrum sales seemed to be slowing down by that point.
Maybe if they had done that earlier on with more systems they could have been around longer.
Daveysloan wrote: ↑Tue Apr 30, 2024 6:08 pm
Eddie Kid outsold Jetpac by over four and a half thousand!!
That dreadful FA Cup game was inexplicably popular. I can't believe how many releases it had & how many it sold.
That's the nature of football games for you though. Just look at FIFA and how that's still selling after all these years, even the Legacy versions EA churned out on consoles they decided to stop supporting.
As for Eddie Kidd, I'd say sometimes if a game isn't a big hit first time around, the budget version can be a success. Mastertronic certainly found that with a lot of their earlier games that were licensed from Mr Chip, Galactic Software (Richard and David Darling) and other publishers.
