BUDGET BRILLIANCE
WHILE GAMES WERE FAR CHEAPER IN THE EIGHTIES COMPARED TO TODAY, NOT EVERYONE HAD A SPARE TENNER TO SPLASH OUT ON THE LATEST TENT-POLE RELEASE. FORTUNATELY, BUDGET GAMES AND COMPILATIONS WERE A GREAT WAY TO ENSURE YOUR HARD-EARNED POCKET MONEY STRETCHED AS FAR AS POSSIBLE
Even if you make adjustments for inflation, games were still cheaper to buy during the mid-eighties than they are today. £9.99 seemed to be the sweet spot for many publishers releasing games during this period and not everyone could justify them, meaning those more coveted releases would typically end up going on Christmas and birthday lists. Fortunately, there were plenty of ways to get your hands on cheap games without resorting to type-in listings, piracy or mail order clubs. Those alternative options were budget games and compilations, and our pockets will be forever grateful for them. “For me it was all about the cost,” explains Simon Plumbe, the founder of Facebook’s Mastertronic Collectors Group. “I didn’t get a lot of pocket money growing up so it meant that I could still get a new game every week.”
When you think of budget games today, Codemasters and Mastertronic are typically the first you think of. Both companies did exceptionally well at selling games at lower price points, and Codemasters is still going strong today – although its founders, Richard and David Darling, have long since left. While lower priced games certainly existed before Mastertronic appeared, it arguably helped shape what would become a very profitable part of the industry in the Eighties and early Nineties. Mastertronic first started selling £1.99 games in April 1984 and shifted over 40,000 units after a week on sale. A combination of enticing artwork, recognisable branding and targeting various home systems worked wonders for the company and led to countless other publishers following suit. “Atlantis really helped keep the VIC-20 going when others moved away from it, so I bought a lot of their games,” continues Simon.
“And I can’t forget Firebird and Codemasters for delivering plenty of top-quality titles as well.”
Plenty of other publishers jumped on board the budget train and the cannier ones even set up specific labels like The Hit Squad (Ocean Software) and Kixx (US Gold) as a way of giving older games a second bite of the cherry. Simon remembers these re-releases fondly. “We might complain about game prices now but as a kid in the Eighties even £10 for a new game was a lot so re-releases were fantastic,” he explains. “There was no way we could afford everything, so getting a slightly older game cheap was great.” Low prices also seemed to help stave off piracy too, with Simon recalling it being less prevalent. “It did happen sadly, but it didn’t seem to stop kids from buying them, either,” he recalls. “The price still made them appealing enough and I remember that I could
always find large piles of budget games at all my friends’ homes!”
Of course, budget games weren’t the only way to enjoy gaming on the cheap in the Eighties; another popular way was to save your money and put it towards the many compilations that publishers released. Sure, some of the earlier examples like Cascade’s Cassette 50 were filled with pretty terrible games, but as the market matured, more and more publishers put larger effort into them, enticing gamers with a selection of hit games that they might not have otherwise been able to afford. Both budget publishers and full-price publishers saw the strength of being able to resell you games, leading to a range of compilations like They
Sold A Million, The Magnificent Seven, The Gold Collection and the many different collections created by Beau Jolly to name just a few.
As great as these compilations proved to be for us, they could certainly provide problems behind the scenes. Simon Berry was a technician at
Speedlock and would add protection to various games and subsequently compilations. “Since the compilation typically came out a couple of years after the original, occasionally there were compatibility issues across the ever-increasing variety of Spectrum hardware (Amstrad was pretty stable) to think about, although these tended to get identified during QA,” he reveals. “Disks were particularly expensive. So then it became the challenge of how many games could fit on one side of a disk. I invented a novel disk format, and used data compression with this to jam as much as I knew how on to disks.”
Those endeavours were tricky but worth it, as they created essential revenue streams for publishers and became a valid way of acquiring a great library of games without spending an absolute fortune in the process. Budget games and compilations became an important aspect of the games industry during this period, and it’s somewhat sad that they’re nowhere near as prevalent today.