Martech
The name on the box was somebody famous
A Sussex publisher that built its catalogue on personality licences — Eddie Kidd, Geoff Capes, Brian Jacks, Nigel Mansell — and made buying an audience into a business model.
Most British publishers of the eighties sold games on the strength of the game. Martech sold them on the strength of whose name was on the box — a stunt rider, a shot putter, a judoka, a Formula One driver — and did it consistently enough that the approach is the company’s defining feature, not an occasional tactic.
Fast facts
- Based: Martech House, Bay Terrace, Pevensey Bay, East Sussex.
- Press evidence in this library: reviewed in CRASH, ZZAP!64, Amstrad Action and Acorn User from 1984 to 1989, mostly at £7.95–£9.99 — and on BBC and Electron as well as the machines listed above.
- Licensed names: Eddie Kidd, Geoff Capes, Brian Jacks, Nigel Mansell, Samantha Fox, Tarzan, and 2000AD’s Nemesis the Warlock and Sláine.
- Unlicensed too: Crazy Comets and Mega Apocalypse, and Tomahawk — the games that get remembered on their own terms.
Buying an audience
Eddie Kidd Jump Challenge set the pattern in 1984. CRASH reported that the stunt rider — then holder of a 190-foot world record — had “been closely involved with the game’s programmers for several months”, and that he would be making personal appearances on the Martech stand at computer fairs. The licence was not just a name printed on a cassette inlay; the man came with it.
It worked. Eddie Kidd’s Jump Challenge sat at #7 in Acorn User’s BBC/Electron Top 20 across successive months in early 1985 — holding position against Elite, Sabre Wulf and Jet Pac. A stunt rider’s name put a £7.95 cassette into the same chart as Acornsoft and Ultimate.
What followed reads like a roster: Geoff Capes Strongman (1985), endorsed by the Olympic shot putter and World’s Strongest Man; Brian Jacks Superstar Challenge; Uchi Mata (1986), a judo game with Brian Jacks credited as technical consultant; Nigel Mansell’s Grand Prix (1988), reviewed at £9.99 and programmed by Dave Looker, which CRASH called “undoubtedly the best race simulator on the market today”. Samantha Fox Strip Poker and Vixen used a different and considerably less defensible kind of celebrity, and the advertising that went with them drew complaints at the time.
The logic is straightforward and worth understanding, because it explains a great deal of eighties British software. A game by an unknown programmer competed against forty others on a shop shelf, all in similar boxes at similar prices. A game with a famous name on it competed against nothing — it had its own reason to be picked up, borrowed from outside the industry entirely. Buying that name cost less than building a reputation.
What the licences were worth
CRASH’s issue 48 index lets the argument be tested rather than asserted, and it does not come out the way the “personality licence” reading predicts.
| Game | Score | Issue | Kind |
|---|---|---|---|
| Zoids | 96% | 25 | toy licence |
| The Planets | 85% | 30 | original |
| Geoff Capes Strongman | 78% | 24 | personality |
| Tarzan | 73% | 36 | character licence |
| Sam Fox Strip Poker | 72% | 28 | personality |
| W.A.R. | 68% | 35 | original |
| The Armageddon Man | 65% | 44 | original |
| Nemesis the Warlock | 61% | 40 | comic licence |
| Catch 23 | 56% | 43 | original |
| Cosmic Shock Absorber | 36% | 41 | original |
| Uchi Mata | 36% | 39 | personality |
Two things fall out of that table.
Martech’s best game by a distance is Zoids, at 96%. It is a licence — but of a toy line rather than a person, and it is the only Martech title in the top bracket of the index.
The personality licences did not protect the games. Uchi Mata — cited above as the judo game carrying Brian Jacks as technical consultant — took 36%. Sam Fox Strip Poker took 72%, Geoff Capes Strongman 78%. A famous name got the cassette picked up off the shelf and did nothing whatever for what was on it, which is the model working exactly as designed and exactly as its critics said.
Zoids swept the house
The table above puts Zoids at 96%, Martech’s best by a distance. Retro Gamer’s month-by-month reconstructions show how completely it was recognised at the time — across all three Newsfield magazines:
| Magazine | Award | Alongside |
|---|---|---|
| CRASH | Smash | Mikie, Yie Ar Kung Fu, Sweevo’s World, Gunfright |
| ZZAP!64 | Sizzler | Spellbreaker (Infocom), Questron, Field of Fire (SSI) |
| Amtix! | Accolade | Batman (Ocean), Movie (Imagine), Redhawk, Way of the Tiger |
Three magazines, three formats, three separate top awards, in a period when CRASH was handing out six Smashes in a good month and ZZAP!64 awarded no Gold Medal at all in another.
⚠ The point stands and gets stronger. Martech’s most decorated game is a toy licence, not a personality one — and the personality licences the company is remembered for produced Uchi Mata at 36%. The house was capable of the top bracket. It mostly chose not to aim there.
The games underneath
The licence strategy tends to obscure that Martech also published straight, unendorsed games that were good. Crazy Comets (1985, £10.95) and its sequel Mega Apocalypse are fast C64 shooters with Rob Hubbard soundtracks — among the tracks that made his name. Tomahawk, the Spectrum helicopter simulation, is the other title that people bring up unprompted.
By 1989 the run was over. Hellfire Attack took a savaging in ZZAP!64, and the name stops appearing.
Why it mattered
Martech is the clearest British example of the licence as a substitute for marketing, a decade before the practice became routine and industrialised. The endorsements it bought were sports personalities and television faces, not film franchises, which makes the catalogue a strange and specific record of who was famous in Britain in 1985.
It also shows the limit of the approach. A licence gets a game picked up; it does not make the game good, and it does not build anything that lasts once the name stops being famous. Martech’s own best-remembered releases turn out to be the ones with nobody’s name on them.