| Posted By
JimmyCoupe
on 2024-03-04
11:11:27
 |  Mastertronic sales
I love those mastertronic sales figures. I am someone that has wondered but now I am someone that needs to ask what is wrong with us all. Video Meanies is awesome so why has it only got half the sales of the god awful Vegas Jackpot? what is wrong with us all and come on, hands up all 36,000 of you that bought that awful Battle game. Did any one as a child actually understand what you were supposed to do in Battle? I think I was robbed on that one.
Some interesting reading and again Finders Keepers has only half the sales of Vegas Jackpot. I take it we all knew the C16/Plus4 wasn't actually going to pay out when you won :-)
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Posted By
Ulysses777
on 2024-03-04
16:00:11
| Re: Mastertronic sales
I think for the most part, it's a simple case of earlier=more.
Vegas Jackpot was one of the first Mastertronic releases, and they barely had any competition on the C16 in the early days.
Oddly enough, Battle is one of the few games that I still clearly remember getting. I was looking for something with keyboard controls, as my joysticks were broken. I got it in Woolworths, which meant that it was inside the blister packaging used by Woolworths and Toys'R'Us, so you couldn't look at the screenshots, which were folded away inside the tape box.
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Posted By
Waz
on 2024-03-05
16:13:37
| Re: Mastertronic sales
As @Ulysses777 correctly noted, the timing of game releases, especially in the early years, helped establish Mastertronic in the C16 and Plus/4 software field, and with their range of support being extensive, did get some brand loyalty back - in droves.
It's also notable that some of the sales around Christmas 1985 were when a lot of us (me included) were getting the Plus/4 Pack from department stores for Christmas, for £99 or so, which was a bargain. Naturally you wanted some extra games cheap and that's where Mastertronic came in - which is why the likes of Tutti Frutti Formula 1 Simulator Big Mac et al sold especially well for that era.
The top ten incidentally have nine Mr Chip games (no surprise whatsoever) with Shaun Southern taking four of the top five sales slots. That top ten reads as:
1 - Formula 1 Simulator - 173,498 (most sales on any single format for a single game)
2 - BMX Racers - 120,227
3 - Vegas Jackpot - 100,651
4 - Kikstart - 92,912
5 - Tutti Frutti - 91,656
6 - Speed King - 88,821
7 - Big Mac - 84,762
8 - Rockman - 84,182
9 - Squirm - 82,108
10 - Spectipede - 79,800
If you take all the sales figures added together (Mastertronic, MAD, Bulldog, Ricochet and exclude Americana, as not all figures known) then that's a massive 2,190,955 games sold altogether. Not bad at all that.
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Posted By
JimmyCoupe
on 2024-03-06
10:36:53
| Re: Mastertronic sales
Mastertronic made the first game I bought for my Plus4, Kane, and like you I got mine for Christmas in the £99 Comet sale. I was tricked by my mum. I had asked for a C64 for a good year, they said we have seen a Plus4 is that a good one, I had no idea what they were going on about and assumed they meant a C64 so said yeah its a good one. Next thing I was opening a plus4 on Christmas day very confused what it was  . How many of us owned a Plus4 due to our parents misunderstanding?
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Posted By
MMS
on 2024-03-06
13:32:12
 | Re: Mastertronic sales
The very first two games I had for my C16 were Formula 1 simulator, the second was Vegas Jackpot.
Seems it is not a coincdence, that I liked these games and they were among the top games sold by Mastertronic
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Posted By
retroscener
on 2024-03-07
12:26:23
 | Re: Mastertronic sales
I wanted a C64 but got a C16 for Christmas 1984 instead. I'm glad about that, as I didn't have much pocket money for games, and the Mastertronic ones tended to be a lot better on the C16 than its C64 version, plus some excellent others.
I did upgrade to a C64 in 1987, and the first game I bought for it was Kikstart II. Graphics and sound blew me away. But I still prefer the C16 version.
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