The £1.99 Game That Sounds Like a Hit Record

Kikstart is the Mastertronic title that more than any other demonstrates what the £1.99 model could produce at its best. Released in 1985 for the Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum, and Amstrad CPC, it placed the player on a motorcycle navigating obstacle courses - logs, gaps, ramps, and barrels - with a pure trial-and-error satisfaction driving the gameplay loop. The premise was simple. The execution, particularly on the C64, was extraordinary.

The game became as famous for its music as its gameplay. Rob Hubbard's SID chip composition for Kikstart entered C64 culture immediately - discussed in Zzap!64 reviews, passed around on copied tapes, and reproduced on SID player apps and tribute compilations four decades later. In 1985, buying a Mastertronic cassette for £1.99 sometimes meant getting a piece of music you would remember for the rest of your life.

Shaun McClure, Rob Hubbard, and a Tight Brief

Kikstart was developed by Shaun McClure at Mr Chip Software - one of the small independent studios that supplied Mastertronic's catalogue on a flat-fee commission basis. Mastertronic's model was clear: pay the developer a fixed amount, retain all rights and distribution, price the result at £1.99. The developer took certainty over royalties; Mastertronic took the upside if the game sold well.

For the C64 version, Mastertronic commissioned Rob Hubbard to compose the soundtrack. Hubbard was at this point establishing himself as the SID chip's foremost composer - methodical, technically innovative, and capable of turning budget commissions into showcases. Kikstart was one of his earliest Mastertronic commissions, and the result established a working relationship that would span dozens of titles and define the label's sonic identity on C64.

The Spectrum and Amstrad versions were separate conversions adapted to each platform's different audio capabilities. The gameplay translated well; the music, inevitably, could not follow the SID chip's lead. On C64, Kikstart existed in a different class.

Obstacle by Obstacle, Learnable by Design

The mechanics were deceptively simple. Accelerate, brake, wheelie. The courses escalated in difficulty with the precision of a well-designed puzzle - each obstacle learnable through repetition, each failure immediate and legible. You could see exactly what killed you. The game understood its own pace completely: failure was never unfair, always instructive.

The single-player campaign offered progressively harder courses. A two-player competitive mode ran both motorcycles on screen simultaneously - rare for a budget title and a significant draw for anyone with a sibling or friend willing to share the joystick. Kikstart 2 (1987) expanded the concept further with a full track editor and enhanced two-player mode, confirming that the original's design had room to grow. See the full catalogue for both Kikstart titles.

Three Oscillators and a Filter Nobody Else Had

The Commodore 64's SID chip (Sound Interface Device) was designed by Bob Yannes and contained three independent voice channels, each supporting multiple waveforms, plus a resonant filter that could sweep across the frequency spectrum. No other home computer of the period had anything comparable. The BBC Micro, ZX Spectrum, and Amstrad CPC all used simpler audio chips that produced far more basic output.

Hubbard's Kikstart composition used all three SID voices in combination with the filter to create a piece that had genuine melodic complexity and tonal warmth - sounds that felt synthesised rather than merely beeped. The piece ran at 50Hz on PAL hardware, updating the filter sweep and voice modulation on every video frame. The technical density was invisible to listeners; the result was simply music that moved them.

The gameplay code itself reflected the tight constraints of budget development: McClure's engine had to fit collision detection, course scrolling, and motorcycle physics into the C64's 64KB of RAM alongside the graphics and Hubbard's music data. The result was lean code that did exactly what was needed and nothing more.

"The SID chip's filter was the thing that set it apart. Nobody else had a filter you could sweep in real time. You could make sounds that were genuinely impossible on any other machine."

Rob Hubbard, composer; as documented in the High Voltage SID Collection (HVSC) composer notes and multiple retrospective interviews with the C64 SID community

Zzap!64 Called It a Classic - the Market Agreed

Contemporary C64 press received Kikstart warmly. Zzap!64 - the dominant Commodore 64 magazine of the period - praised both the gameplay's tight design and, specifically, the Rob Hubbard soundtrack. Music was treated as a genuine criterion of quality in C64 reviews of the era, and a Hubbard score was understood to represent an investment by the publisher in the product's quality.

Commercial performance matched critical reception. Kikstart moved in large numbers at Woolworths and W.H. Smith, becoming one of Mastertronic's most successful catalogue titles. The combination of an accessible gameplay concept, a genuinely excellent C64 implementation, and a soundtrack that gave people a reason to load the game even when not playing it made the cassette stand out on the spinner rack.

The SID Music That Outlasted the Hardware

Kikstart 2 arrived in 1987 with a track editor - a remarkable feature for a budget sequel - and an expanded Hubbard soundtrack. The sequel confirmed the original's standing as Mastertronic's most beloved franchise. See both titles in the catalogue.

The Rob Hubbard Kikstart composition entered the SID music preservation community almost immediately. The High Voltage SID Collection (HVSC), which has documented C64 SID music since 1996, includes multiple Kikstart variants and platform ports. The piece is playable today in browser-based SID players and continues to appear in C64 tribute concerts and chip music compilations.

Kikstart's legacy is inseparable from Hubbard's. The game gave him one of his earliest Mastertronic platforms; Mastertronic's budget model gave him the volume of commissions that made him the era's most prolific SID composer. The pairing worked for both. You can play Kikstart in-browser on the play page.

A Television Mascot, a Scrolling World, and £1.99

Action Biker is the Mastertronic title that most clearly demonstrated the label's ambition. Released in 1985 for the C64, Spectrum, and Amstrad CPC, it took a character already known from British television advertising - Clumsy Colin, the mascot of KP Skips crisps - and placed him on a motorcycle in a large scrolling open-world environment.

For a £1.99 game, the scale was remarkable. Most budget titles of the period were single-screen or simple linear affairs. Action Biker offered a multi-directional scrolling world with different environments, petrol stations, collectables, and locations to discover. The open map approach was ahead of typical budget game design. It was not a game that looked or behaved like it cost £1.99.

Impact Software, KP Skips, and a Budget Licence

Action Biker was developed by Impact Software - another of the small studios working in Mastertronic's flat-fee commission model. The Clumsy Colin character was licensed from KP Snacks Ltd, the manufacturer of KP Skips crisps. The character had appeared in a television advertising campaign aimed at children, giving him genuine market recognition among the C64's primary demographic.

Character licences were expensive for publishers at any price tier. Mastertronic had built its entire model around avoiding the costs that put games in the £7.95-£9.95 bracket. The Clumsy Colin deal represented an exception to that rule - a bet that the television recognition would translate to sales at the spinner rack. The bet paid off.

The resulting game was one of Mastertronic's best-reviewed original titles. Unlike some budget commissions that delivered functional but uninspiring gameplay, Impact Software's implementation took genuine advantage of the C64's hardware. The scrolling world, the character animation, and the overall scope exceeded what the economics of the commission typically produced.

Fill Up and Find Everything on the Map

The player controlled Clumsy Colin on his motorcycle across a large multi-directional scrolling map. The core loop required collecting petrol from filling stations to keep the bike running while also visiting locations scattered across the world. Different environments - roads, parks, countryside - gave the map visual variety. The game had no single path through it; finding all the locations required exploration rather than following a script.

This open structure was unusual for 1985 budget software. Most titles at the price point offered a clear left-to-right or top-to-bottom progression that exhausted itself quickly. Action Biker gave players a world to return to, a map to gradually understand, and a challenge that rewarded spatial memory as much as reaction time.

Scrolling Four Directions on a 1-MHz Processor

Multi-directional scrolling on the C64 required careful management of the VIC-II graphics chip's hardware sprites and character mode display. The C64's processor ran at approximately 1 MHz, and a smoothly scrolling world - with character tiles updating in all four directions as the player moved - represented a meaningful programming challenge at that speed.

Impact Software's implementation delivered smooth scrolling across a genuinely large map by keeping the visible area small and the tile update logic tight. The Clumsy Colin character sprite was handled by the VIC-II's hardware sprite system, keeping him visually separate from the background and allowing clean movement over the scrolling map beneath. The technical execution was polished enough that the game did not feel like its engine was working hard - which, at the C64's clock speed, it certainly was.

"The budget end was always interesting because you had to really think about what you were doing. You couldn't hide sloppy code behind extra hardware. Every byte had to earn its place."

Richard Darling, co-founder of Codemasters, whose early career was shaped by the budget software market; speaking in Retro Gamer Magazine, Issue 2 (2004), on the discipline of 8-bit budget development

Critics Noticed the Scope First

Contemporary reviews of Action Biker consistently highlighted the game's scale as its defining quality. For reviewers who had benchmarked budget games as short, shallow experiences that justified their low price by offering low value, Action Biker was a surprise. The Clumsy Colin character received specific attention - some reviews found the cross-promotion charming; others noted it as evidence of a new direction for budget publishing.

Commercially, Action Biker was one of Mastertronic's strongest performers in the 1985 catalogue. The KP Skips name recognition among children, combined with genuinely positive word-of-mouth about the game's depth, drove repeat purchases from families who had already bought once and wanted to know if the publisher's other titles were equally good. Many were; some were not. Action Biker set a high bar.

The Character Licence That Proved a Point

Action Biker established that a budget publisher operating at £1.99 could secure a licensed character from a major brand and deliver a game worthy of that licence. It demonstrated to the wider UK software industry - where character licences were understood as necessarily premium products - that the budget model was not incompatible with serious production values.

Clumsy Colin did not appear in further Mastertronic games. The KP Skips licensing arrangement was a one-time collaboration rather than an ongoing relationship. But the precedent mattered: Action Biker showed that budget publishers could compete for IP that the premium tier assumed was theirs by right. See all Mastertronic titles on the catalogue page. The founders who built this model are profiled on the people page.

The Puzzle from Moscow, Cleared for British Cassettes

Mastertronic's publication of Tetris in 1987 under the M.A.D. label represents the most historically significant single release in the company's existence. Alexey Pajitnov had created the game at the Soviet Academy of Sciences in Moscow in 1984 - a block-stacking puzzle of such elegant simplicity that it required no tutorial, no prior gaming experience, and no shared cultural context to understand. Anyone could play it within seconds of picking up the controls.

By 1987 the game's rights were becoming the subject of intense commercial competition as Western publishers recognised its global potential. Mastertronic, through the M.A.D. label, secured the first legitimate licence for the UK market - beating publishers with far larger resources to what would become gaming history's most fought-over rights package. The edition for C64 and Spectrum was, therefore, the first legally licensed Tetris in British homes.

Robert Stein, Elorg, and the Rights That Rewrote Gaming History

The path to Mastertronic's Tetris licence ran through Robert Stein's company Andromeda Software, a British consultancy that had brokered contacts with Soviet software export authorities. Stein had negotiated what he understood to be an agreement with Elorg - Electronorgtechnica, the Soviet state agency responsible for exporting software - giving Andromeda rights to license Tetris to Western publishers.

Andromeda sublicensed the rights to Mastertronic for the UK cassette market. The legal status of these sublicences would later be disputed as Elorg - asserting that no formal agreement had been completed with Stein - attempted to reassert control and negotiate directly with publishers. The subsequent rights battles involved Mirrorsoft, Atari, and ultimately Nintendo, whose Game Boy deal for Tetris (secured directly with Elorg in 1989) rendered all previous Western licences for handheld and console versions invalid.

Mastertronic's cassette licence, being limited to home computer platforms, was a separate matter from the console and handheld battles. Their 1987 edition existed in the window before the full complexity of the rights situation became apparent. They were, at the time, acting in good faith on a licence they had paid for. Andromeda's developer for the C64 and Spectrum versions produced a clean, faithful implementation. The C64 soundtrack was composed by Wally Beben, whose SID work for Mastertronic across many titles gave the M.A.D. editions a musical quality that matched the premium positioning.

Seven Shapes, One Playfield, No Instructions Required

Tetris presented the player with seven differently shaped pieces - the tetrominoes - falling one at a time from the top of a rectangular well. The player rotated and moved each piece as it fell, aiming to place it so that complete horizontal lines were formed at the base. Completed lines cleared and scored points. Gaps left by poor placement accumulated until the well filled and the game ended.

The rule set was minimal enough to communicate itself through play: there was no way to "read" Tetris before playing it, because reading was unnecessary. Within thirty seconds of starting, a first-time player understood the system completely. This self-teaching quality was what made Tetris universally playable in a way that most games of the era - designed for hobbyists who would read a manual - were not.

The Mastertronic C64 edition was a faithful implementation. Wally Beben's SID soundtrack gave the falling pieces a musical accompaniment that the original Soviet version had lacked - the famous Russian folk tune arrangement that became synonymous with Tetris on Western platforms had not yet been established as the definitive soundtrack, leaving Beben's interpretation as the frame of reference for British players in 1987.

Faithfulness as an Achievement in Itself

For a licensed adaptation, fidelity to the original is a technical requirement as much as a design choice. Pajitnov's Tetris was designed on Soviet government computer hardware running specialised software; translating it to a C64 required rebuilding the piece physics, rotation system, and line-clear logic from scratch. Andromeda's team delivered a version that felt like Tetris - the timing of piece movement, the responsiveness of rotation, the speed escalation across levels all matched the addictive quality of the original closely enough that British players who later encountered other versions would recognise them as the same game.

The M.A.D. label's slightly elevated price point - above the standard £1.99 - gave the Tetris cassette slightly more packaging budget than the core label titles. The presentation reflected the game's status as a significant licensed property rather than an original commission.

"I was just happy when people played it and understood it immediately. I wanted to make something so simple that it needed no explanation. When I saw that it worked - that anyone could pick it up - that was the moment I knew it was something different."

Alexey Pajitnov, designer of Tetris; speaking in the BBC documentary "Tetris: From Russia With Love" (2004), about his intentions when designing the game in 1984

The Name Alone Was Sufficient Marketing

By 1987, Tetris had circulated in British computing circles through unofficial copies and word of mouth. The name had cultural traction before Mastertronic published their edition. This meant the cassette did not need extensive review coverage to sell - the market already knew what Tetris was and wanted it. The M.A.D. label version gave players something they had been waiting for: a clean, legal, properly packaged release they could buy at Woolworths.

Contemporary reviews noted the clean implementation and praised the addictive loop in terms that applied equally to all versions of Tetris - recognition that the game's appeal was inherent rather than something the adaptor had to create. For Mastertronic, a positive review of Tetris was effectively a positive review of their licence. They had made the right call in pursuing the rights.

First Chapter in Gaming's Most Documented Rights War

Mastertronic's 1987 Tetris stands at the opening of what became the most extensively documented legal and commercial conflict in gaming history. The rights saga - Stein versus Elorg, Mirrorsoft versus Atari, Nintendo's Game Boy deal displacing all previous Western claims - eventually resolved in Nintendo's favour and made the Game Boy version the definitive Western Tetris for millions of players.

Mastertronic's cassette edition was not swept aside by those later events; it remained in the market for its natural life as the rights battles focused on console and handheld platforms. But it became a footnote - a historically important one - in the story of how Tetris arrived in the West. Mastertronic was there first, legally, in the UK. That matters.

Alexey Pajitnov himself received no royalties from any Western edition of Tetris during the Soviet period - all revenue went to the Soviet state. He eventually moved to the United States and, in 1996, finally began receiving royalties when the Tetris Company was formally established. Mastertronic's £1.99 (plus) cassettes were among the many Western releases that generated revenue for publishers without reaching their creator. That context gives every copy of the Mastertronic Tetris a more complicated history than the cassette label suggests. See the full games catalogue for further Mastertronic titles.