Mastertronic
History
Mastertronic, one of the first budget publishers, was launched on 2nd April 1984. Many of their earliest games were created by Richard and David Darling, who would later sell their 50% stake in the company to create their own rival company, Codemasters. Mastertronic had several sub-labels; Bulldog (1987-88) and Entertainment USA (1986-88) carried original titles, Mastertronic Added Dimension (1985-89) was used for games at the higher than usual price of £2.99, and Ricochet (1987-89) was a dedicated re-release label. In 1987, the company also became involved in running budget labels for other companies, with Americana Software for US Gold and Rack-It/Rebound for Hewson, while also acquiring Melbourne House as a full price label and becoming the UK distributor for Sega. Virgin merged with Mastertronic in 1988 creating Virgin Mastertronic. While it continued to use Virgin Games and Melbourne House for full price releases, the numerous budget sub-labels were gradually phased out with Mastertronic Plus being introduced in 1989 for all budget releases. In 1991, Sega Europe bought the Mastertronic part of the company forcing Virgin to re-christen the budget label as Tronix.
Note
The figures for Months in the Top 10 and Months at No. 1 are based on the All Format and Multi Format chart only.
Columns are sortable, sorting by the cover column will sort by chart appearance date.
