Mastertronic Added Dimension
£2.99, because £1.99 had a ceiling
Mastertronic's second budget tier, created when £1.99 stopped being enough to pay for an ambitious game — and the label that carried the Magic Knight adventures.
M.A.D. — Mastertronic Added Dimension — was Mastertronic’s answer to a problem its own success had created. £1.99 games sold in enormous numbers, and £1.99 would not pay for a game that took longer than a few months to write.
Fast facts
- Price: £2.99, one pound above the parent label.
- Press evidence in this library: CRASH and ZZAP!64, 1985–1988.
- Published: Stormbringer, Revenge of the Mutant Camels II, Super Trolley, Plexar.
- The Magic Knight series: CRASH describes Stormbringer as the fourth Magic Knight game, after Finders Keepers, Spellbound and Knight Tyme.
Same company, different brand
M.A.D. was not a separate business. It was one of a family of brands Mastertronic ran alongside Bulldog, Ricochet and Entertainment USA — plus, by 1987, a record label and a video label. CRASH found the proliferation funny enough to introduce one as “yet another MASTERTRONIC label”.
The distinction is a price point rather than an organisation.
⚠ And it is barely visible in the archive. The Spectrum press held here never prints “Added Dimension” as a label at all; the reviews credit Producer: Mastertronic and let the price carry the difference. Sibling labels were treated differently — Bulldog reviews print “Producer: Bulldog” — so the imprint was applied unevenly.
What does survive is the tier itself. Extracting producer-and-price pairs from Mastertronic reviews returns a clean split at £1.99 and £2.99 with nothing in between, which is the M.A.D. line drawn in the only place the magazines recorded it consistently.
The pound that bought a bigger game
The gap between £1.99 and £2.99 sounds small and was not. A budget publisher’s economics come down to one line: the price, times the number sold, minus manufacturing, is what pays for the game. Raise the price by fifty per cent and, if the audience holds, the development budget rises by roughly the same.
What that bought is visible in the catalogue. The Magic Knight games are proper arcade adventures — dozens of rooms, an inventory, a menu-driven interaction system, puzzles that need a map and notes. They are the kind of game that would have sat at £7.95 on another label, and they came out at £2.99.
Jeff Minter’s Revenge of the Mutant Camels II on the same label makes the same point from another direction. A named, established programmer with a following was releasing at budget price, which in 1987 was no longer a statement about quality.
The author problem
The Magic Knight games were written by David Jones — not the Dave Jones who founded DMA Design in Dundee and made Lemmings and Grand Theft Auto.
Both are British, both worked in the same decade, and a search on the name alone merges them. Your Sinclair was already running a competition about it in 1986, with David Bowie as the third answer. The Vault keeps the two apart with an explicit slug, because an incorrect link is worse than a missing one — it asserts an identity instead of leaving a gap someone can fill.
Why it mattered
M.A.D. is price tiering in action, the mechanism by which the British budget market grew up. Between 1984 and 1988 the ladder filled in — £1.99, £2.99, £3.99, £9.99 mid-price, £7.95 to £9.95 full price — and each rung existed because somebody discovered the rung below it could not fund the games they wanted to publish.
It also complicates the neat division between budget and full price. By 1987 a £2.99 cassette could hold a large, well-made arcade adventure by a known author, and the only reliable way to tell what you were buying was to read a review.