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Home computers were a large part of my life in the Eighties, and of course with that went playing lots and lots of computer games! Back then games generally cost anywhere from five to ten pounds on cassette, with the £9.99 price point soon becoming the norm. If you wanted the disk version (if you were lucky enough to have a disk drive back then, and if you were able to find a shop that even stocked floppy disk versions of games) you’d be looking at £14.99.
These prices were of course well out of reach for most kids pocket money, so you either had to save up, invoke pester power mode, or wait for birthdays or Christmas to roll round before you got your next new slice of video gaming action.
That was until Mastertronic came along and launch their range of budget games for the rather more modest sum of £1.99! I remember seeing these for the first time in a newsagents, not the sort of place that typically stocked computer games back then. The cassette boxes were held in a big black plastic tray hung on a wall, with the distinctive wireframe M logo emblazoned across the top. I dug around in my pocket, found two quid and chose a game, which happened to be BMX Racers for the Commodore 64.
I rushed home and immediately loaded it up, and was presented with something that was indeed worth the price tag. It certainly wasn’t the best game I ever owned, but given the price I didn’t really feel that cheated. In fact, the game was so difficult and repetitive in nature that I probably played it far more than I normally would have, just to see if it ever got any better. It didn’t. To give you some idea of the quality, here’s a little video clip of it…
This game didn’t put me off though, and over the next few years I bought several Mastertronic “199 games“. Some of them were better than others, but some were actually very good indeed, with many featuring excellent music from the likes of classic C64 composer Rob Hubbard (still a hero of mine to this day!).
It wasn’t long before the market for budget games expanded either. Other companies came along, most notably Firebird, which was part of British Telecom, and helped up the quality bar and also led to introduction of a luxury range of budget games, priced at £2.99! Some of the better titles I remember enjoying were Action Biker (which was a tie in with KP Skips crisps), Thrust (still brilliant today), One Man and His Droid (could never work out the game, but the music was brilliant) and even the drum machine simulator Micro Rhythm (which was written by a guy who I eventually went to go and work for when I got my first job in the games industry – happy days!).
Another company to start up as a budget game purveyor was Codemasters, a company still going strong today. It was actually set up by the authors of the afore-mentioned BMX Racers, Richard and David Darling, who set up their company to initially sell their own games after having success with Mastertronic whilst they were still at school. Codemasters early titles were actually pretty good, and indeed one of their first games was another BMX related title, BMX Simulator, which was actually very good. This started a trend where most of their games titles were known to end in the word Simulator, even when it sometimes didn’t really make sense.
Booty ! Dizzy ! superb Spectrum budget efforts.
This then lef top budgets re-releases of old faves and that was superb.
Indeed! Initially budget games were all original (or perhaps I should say mostly cheap rip offs of better known game like Pacman or Space Invaders) but before long you started seeing full price titles getting a re-release at a budget price, great if you missed a particular game the first time round.
Wow! Those graphics are amazing. I can’t believe how realistic they look.
Mastertronic…… that takes me back. Remember Kikstart? Clumsy Colin! Firebird had a superb budget range, Gogo The Ghost, Chimera with its scary music, Booty, Thrust!! Many’s the night I stayed up playing Thrust while The Rockford Files and V was on the telly! Also ending up cheap, Jet Set Willy…… Oh, the perils of the Chapel – Lords Of Midnight…… and the forgotten pleasures of the text adventure.
Favourite Mastertronic game was Finders Keepers. Magical!
All great games, and I think I had all of those too! Thrust really was awesome for a budget game, as was Kikstart and Clumsy Colin – I played that for hours, humming along to the music as I played. Never quite managed to complete it though – I’m amazed the author was able to come up with so many motorbike related accessories for you to pick up.
I was a big fan of the budget games myself; I think the first one I ever played was a Firebird title called Cylu, which a younger brother of mine got as a birthday present one year. Ironically, he never really got into it, but I became positively obsessed with it myself, spending months trying to finish it (it was quite difficult). Unfortunately, however, the experience of actually doing so proved strangely anti-climactic, as not only did the game have a decidedly crummy ending (just a few lines of text that didn’t make much sense), but there was also a sense of “Well, I finished that. Now what am I going to do to amuse myself?”
Mastertronic is another brand name that brings back memories for me. Two titles of theirs I remember playing were Spectipede (basically a Centipede ripoff) and City Fighter, which involved you trying to defend London from alien spaceships that looked (to me anyway) like white jubes, multi-coloured biscuit tins, or blue corkscrews. With the first type of ships, it was possible to either blow them up outright or merely damage them and send them plummeting to the ground with smoke belching out of them, and I have to admit that a sadistic part of me preferred disposing of them the second way!
While I never played any Codemasters titles as best I can remember, I do recall them releasing a lot of “simulators”, as you mentioned. Indeed, I remember one computer game magazine I used to read at the time getting a lot of letters from jokers who’d claim that they’d come up with a great idea for a simulator game – one that in actual fact sounded excruciatingly boring (eg a “suntanning simulator” or a “drawer-opening simulator”) – and say that they reckoned Codemasters would be just the label to release it for them!