One year before Peter Weller stalked the streets of Old Detroit as Robocop in his mission to eradicate crime, Sylvester Stallone and his mirrored shades stalked the streets of Los Angeles as Detective Marion “Cobra” Cobretti, AKA “the strong arm of the law.” And just as they did with Robocop later on, Ocean waved some money at Warner Bros. and said, “We want to make a game out of your movie.” Unfortunately for Commodore 64 gamers, Warner Bros. said, “Sure thing.” Probably followed by, “Can we get some more cocaine in here?”

While I’ll be the first to admit the entry from August 3rd was a less-than-optimal usage of a film license, at least Domark managed to make a playable game out of Friday the 13th. A game that failed to live up to its pre-release hype, but one worth playing if only to see the developer had its heart in the right place. 1986’s Commodore 64/128 release of Cobra, on the other hand, is an example of unrepentant clusterfuckery. If there was any justice in the world, all involved in this should have become acquainted with the phrases, ‘tarred and feathered’, ‘beaten like a red-headed step-child’, and ‘Well, roll me in salmon and throw me to the grizzlies!’.

If you’re looking for the best part of the game, you just found it.

Cobra‘s attempt to follow the plot of the film is so squalid it’s easier to think of it as bad fanfic. Stage one has Cobra searching the streets for Ingrid, a frightened model and only living witness to the Night Slasher’s antics. Despite being a police officer about to confront a band of ax-toting lunatics, Cobra leaves home with nothing but his gloves and shades, assuming some game designer stashed a pistol, knife, laser-sighted SMG, and a few grenades where he can get at them.

Stallone in tight leather pants, dancing on garbage cans, as Cobretti never did.

Stage two takes place in the countryside, where Cobra fends off an army of besieging punks intent on kidnapping Ingrid. Inexplicably this entails Cobra dropping her off at a log cabin, in a car which looks nothing like the ”clearly not compensating for anything here, no siree!” street creature he drives in the movie, before heading out on foot to flex everyone to death.

Fashion crime is still a crime, scumbag!

The third and final stage of the game takes place at a factory, where Cobra’s cornered the remaining members of the gang and is heading for his final confrontation with the Night Slasher himself. Or at least there would be a final confrontation if anybody had actually bothered to (and I know this is a ridiculous notion, but bear with me here) finish the game.  That’s right: walk to the end of the factory towards your final shootout/brawl with Brian Thompson’s 8-bit sprite and…ha ha, back to stage one with you!

The sewer/factory hybrid, shown here in all its dumb.

Look, I understand there are games out there for which endlessly cycling through until you lose your last life is a valid design decision. For Space Invaders or Centipede, this makes perfect sense–they’re about survival. You cannot win, you can only hope to die with a larger score than the next guy. But Cobra is a game based on a film that used the not-uncommon stylistic choice of having a beginning, middle, and end. It has a ready-made plot just sitting there. You need not include every minute of it in your game, but you should at least do what A View to a Kill did: pick a few key scenes, code them in, and give us an ending more gratifying than a simple Game Over screen.

Oh yes, I remember the part where Cobra climbed over all those haystacks very well!

But if you’re going to screw us over on a film-to-game conversion and not even give us an ending, you should at least have the common courtesy to make sure your game is fun to play. Cobra fails so spectacularly on this front it belongs in the landfill, preferably underneath all those recently-excavated copies of E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial. The graphics, barring the title screen which is a pretty good 8-bit recreation of the movie poster artwork, are boring and uninspired. The controls are as responsive as a deaf cat to a squeaky toy, with Stallone’s on-screen alter-ego walking like he pulled the trigger on that pearl-handled pistol in his waistband. I’ll admit grabbing big, beefy hamburgers to refill your life meter is cute, but many other games use the ‘pick up food laying all over the ground’ mechanic to restore health so this is hardly unique. Sound effects and music are utterly forgettable with the exception of the title screen music, which is an unused piece from the film’s original soundtrack entitled “Skyline”.

Stallone couldn’t even fit into this thing in real life. Be serious, guys!

It’s very difficult to translate a film to a video game, especially a movie like Cobra which thrives on its big action set-pieces, Stallone’s witty one-liners, and little else. But even by licensed game standards this is criminally (oh man, we are so going to hell for that one) awful. Anything giving LJN’s NES titles a run for their money shouldn’t be found anywhere near your computer. The movie’s tagline is, “Crime is a disease.  Meet the cure.” Unfortunately the only thing Cobra on the C64/128 will cure is your desire to play it.

Enjoy the retro ad goodie. I apologize profusely.

Michael Crisman

In 1979, Michael Crisman was mauled by a radioactive Gorgar pinball machine. After the wounds healed, doctors discovered his DNA had been re-coded. No longer fully human, Michael requires regular infusions of video games in order to continue living among you. If you see him, he can see you. Make no sudden moves, but instead bribe him with old issues of computer and video game magazines or a mint-in-box copy of Dragon Warrior IV.


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