16 Portland Road, London, W11
NOW READ ON.
2/4 Vernon Yard. Portobello Road, London W11
Virgin brought 45% of Mastertronic in 1987, and purchased the remaining 55% in 1988. This was marked this with another PR photo in Virgin's series of pictures of Nick Alexander doing things. This time he is sitting on a car; see the bottom of the first Virgin Games article for more examples of the head of Virgin Games doing things to generate magazine coverage. Mastertronic moved to Vernon Yard from their Paul Street address in September 1988. Anthony Guter on his Mastertronic History website writes of the move: "This signalled the beginning of the end of the key Mastertronic budget business. Virgin were not really interested in it – they wanted the Sega franchise." This is echoed in Richard Branson's biography Losing My Virginity, where he writes: "Virgin had acquired the European licence to distribute Sega games in 1988, when we bought the company who owned it, Mastertronic. At the time we had little idea of the potential of the computer-games business. All I knew was that Holly, Sam and their friends were suddenly spending a lot of time playing computer games on the television... It seemed like a good business to get into." There's a year gap between the acquisition of Mastertronic and the company formally changing it's name. Companies House records Virgin Mastertronic coming into existence on 17th October 1989. If you want more information about the history of the company you should check out the excellent Mastertronic Collectors Archive.
Meanwhile Mastertronic was facing diminishing returns. Anthony Guter's website has a sales graph which peaks in 1986/87 at just over 5 million units. This falls to 3.5 million in the 1987/88 financial year, and then drops by around a million units each year. The big innovation in 1989 was the launch of a budget range of software for the Amiga and Atari ST, called 16 Blitz, which sold software for the new machines at the eyebrow raisingly low price of £4.99. The best way to mark this launch was with a PR photo but Nick Alexander was unavailable so Mastertronic founders Frank Herman and Alan Sharam stood either side of newly appointed budget manager Andrew Wright in their bestest suits. AMIGA FORMAT were grateful for the chance to fill quarter of a page. As Anthony Guter points out on his website, the appointment of a budget software manager: "...symbolised the
fall of budget games within the company. Previously, budget was seen
as the heart of the business and was run personally by the directors.
Now it was assigned to a rather junior member of staff."
Viz Comic, for those who don't know, is an adult comic founded in 1979. A distribution deal was signed with Virgin Books in 1985, and then in 1987 the executive who handled Viz, John Brown, set up his own publishing company to distribute Viz, and sales were north of 1 million copies by 1989. Viz was for a while the third most read magazine in the country behind the Radio Times and one other magazine I can't remember because my copy of Rude Kids, by Viz editor Chris Donald, has gone AWOL.
Let's talk about offices instead. Ladbroke Grove was a centre for counterculture when Virgin arrived in 1972 but, disappointingly, Richard Branson doesn't give any specific reasons in his autobiography for choosing Vernon Yard. It's almost as if it wasn't important. Virgin Mastertronic stayed on site for two years and then moved out in the summer of 1990.
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| YOUR COMPUTER January 1988 page 8 |
It seems best to consider Virgin Mastertronic as two companies wedged together. There's the SEGA distribution company and the home computer games company. To confuse things further the home computer games company also has two labels. Virgin, who continued to release full price games, and Mastertronic, who continued to release budget games. Melbourne House was a casualty of the deal. The veteran software house had been brought by Mastertronic early in 1987 as a label for full price games. The new company had no need for two competing full price labels so Melbourne House was quietly wound down; it's last release was Barbarian (different to the Palace Software game) on behalf of Psygnosis.
It was business as usual for Virgin Games in the 1988 to 1991 period. They released games for all the usual home formats; Commodore 64, Amstrad and ZX Spectrum with the new 16-bit formats, Amiga and Atari ST, gradually becoming more prominent. They published Silkworm, Gemini Wing, and Shinobi, all early Sales Curve games written long before the company became massively successful as SCi. Virgin also published Monty Python's Flying Circus by Core Design; six years before they created Tomb Raider. What's surprising is how few SEGA games Virgin released in the period when the company was also distributing the Master System. I'm willing to be proved wrong but I can only find two; Ivan 'Ironman' Stewart's Super Off Road and World Cup Italia '90. Virgin Games seemed to release more titles for the Master System and Mega Drive after SEGA brought back the console distribution rights in 1991.
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| AMIGA FORMAT November 1989 page 6 |
SEGA was where the real action was within the company. Virgin started out distributing the Master System and added the Mega Drive October 1990. The figures involved are eye-watering, as Richard Branson reveals in his biography: "By 1991 the sales of Sega in Europe had soared to £150 million, up from £2 million in 1988. By then we were beginning to be rather terrified that the bubble might burst. In order to maintain our position we were having to spend £70 million marketing Sega each year, before the cost of financing the sales. There was always the danger that, because these games were primarily sold to an extremely narrow section of teenage boys, if another craze came along out of the blue, then Sega’s sales would collapse." You can see a selection of SEGA television adverts on Youtube. More interesting are the adverts the company ran in Viz Comic, which have achieved a degree of notoriety over the years.
The adverts start in issue 38, October/November 1989. You can find collections of them online often with headlines describing them as risky, outrageous, bizarre, unbelievably dirty, and so on. They are certainly unique. SEGA wouldn't consider running adverts today which encourage people to piss their logo in the snow, or associate Sonic the Hedgehog with piss, or, for a non-urinary alternative, link Ecco the Dolphin with cocaine because he's got a blow hole. One SEGA advert is headlined: "The more you play with it the harder it gets" (I know). The copy runs: "You sit there eyes glued to the writhing arcade-quality graphics, pulling and squeezing your knob. Now you're breathing heavily over the digital stereo sound. Now you're shooting it all over the place but it's no use... GAME OVER." If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery this is an insult. It misunderstands what makes Viz work and assumes it's just a mass of one-dimensional innuendo and swearing, as the comic's critics often claimed. It's easy to sound like a refugee from Pseud's Corner when talking about why humour does, or doesn't work, but I always thought there was clear blue water between the material Viz produced and the desperate us-as-well-ing of it's advertisers, because Virgin wasn't unique in running edgy adverts customised to the (perceived) readership. And, what do I know? I haven't sold 150,000 SEGA Master Systems recently.
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| August 2022 |
16 Portland Road, London, W11
Virgin needed cash in 1991. Virgin Music signed Janet Jackson for $25 million and the company wanted to reduce debt to the banks and, in Richard Branson's phrase, "show the outside world some of the hidden value within the Virgin Group." Fortunately SEGA wanted the licence to distribute its products in Europe and paid £33 million. Ten times more than the original purchase price. Nice work.
NEW COMPUTER EXPRESS covered the sale (27 July 1991 page 4). The report gave an estimated sale price of £40 million and noted, "Virgin Games, the software publishing wing of the Branson computer off-shoot, is retained by Virgin Communications with unlimited publishing rights to produce Sega games." That's a slightly garbled version of what actually happened. SEGA brought the entire Virgin Mastertronic company from Virgin, who had already set up a separate internal group to develop software. Richard Branson fills in the details in his biography: "Before starting discussions to sell the Sega licence, Robert [Devereux, one of the partners in Virgin Group] had hived off the small team who wrote the software programmes into a separate company called Virgin Interactive. In 1990 the next wave of technology would be games which were played on compact disc, and Robert commissioned a number of software writers to come up with programmes for CDs. Without Sega and Sonic the Hedgehog to worry about, the tiny team of software programmers that Robert had assembled in America began to devise a new game for CD-ROM technology. They named it The 7th Guest."
Nick Alexander moved across to become Managing Director of SEGA Europe with Frank Herman as his deputy. Alan Sharam became Managing Director of SEGA UK. Martin Alper, one of the other co-founders of Mastertronic, stayed with Virgin and went on to become President of Virgin Games, who would go on to be renamed Virgin Interactive Entertainment.
ACE magazine would occasionally hold what they called Reader Conferences, where a selected few would visit the office of a software house for a preview of coming attractions. The Virgin Conference took place on Wednesday 19th June. This was before news of the sale broke but the finished article was written with the benefit of hindsight (September 1991 page 35) so it was able to value Virgin Mastertronic's price at £36 million. Nick Alexander starts the article with a typical piece of bombast: "Lets face it, back in 1983 when we started, you had to be pretty stupid not to make loads of money." I like to imagine a couple of PR people shuffling into his eye-line and making frantic dial-it-back-a-bit gestures, it's notable he's then whisked out of the office before he can be quoted saying anything else.
SEGA, weren't bothered about Mastertronic so their story ends here. I've been trying to work out what was the last Mastertronic game. A few possible candidates were released around late 1990, early 1991. CRASH issue 87 mentions three ZX Spectrum games Continental Circus, Double Dragon, Gemini Wing, and Silkworm, but these were rerelease. A few months before, December 1990 issue 83, there's a review of Rugby Manager although on the inlay that has a copyright date of 1989. Moving back a few more months ZZAP64 has a review of a Commodore 64 game called Rad Ramp Racer, September 1990 page page 39, which appears to be an original game rather than a rerelease, and at the same time CRASH reviews a Spectrum game called Super Stock Car; so lets call it a tie between those two games.
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| June 1991 |
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| October 2022 |
*yes, "Game Boy's". For shame, ACE. I'm not sure about "be-eping" either.
The saga of Twitter continues but I'm still on there for the time being @ShamMountebank, if you want to see what a low activity account looks like. Last week I posted a picture from The One magazine and retweeted three things. Frankly, I'm exhausted.
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