Popular Computing Weekly put a full page interview with Martin Alper in their issue of 19 July, 1984. It was illustrated with a photo that Which will be featured in the upcoming History page.
There is a lot of ground covered. Alper speculates that Mastertronic would be one of several businesses, that a move into disc-based games was coming, that “half” the business would shortly be moving to the USA and that MSX would be a key part of the personal computer business. His comments appear to imply that Mastertronic was already being widely distributed in the USA; this was hot air – it was only being discussed with potential distributors at the CES show that summer.
Martin’s final comments about ROMS are baffling. Was he referring to arcade machine chips or was he confusing ROMS with the RAM chips used in personal computers?
Martin Alper’s comments at the end likely refer to selling games much bigger than the target machine’s memory by using a memory-augmenting external ROM cartridge to hold large parts of the code – along the lines of Imagine’s ill-fated Bandersnatch. I think the only title published to actually do this (on the Spectrum at least) was Mikro-Gen’s Shadow Of The Unicorn.
I remember buying a couple of Mastertronic games from ASDA. I can even recall now that they were Cage Match and Jason’s Gem, however, I don’t ever remember seeing Mastertronic games in Tesco.
Think I got most of my Mastertronic games from smaller, independent stores or a local garage that doubled-up as a video library. It was only about 15 minutes walk from our house and they always had a decent selection of budget games in by the counter.