Commando – “Now rush the 2nd area”

1985 was quite a year for Tokuro Fujiwara. He had earlier started his career at Konami, joining from Osaka Designers’ College to do visual design work, initially without realising it was a video game company. A couple of years after that, and having moved further into making games, he and colleague Yoshiki Okamoto decided together to move to Capcom. Fujiwara designed Vulgus and Higemaru for Capcom in 1984. Then, for 1985, he worked on another two arcade games simultaneously, both of which would prove a lot more successful. He later said that developing two completely different games at once made it easier to capitalize on new ideas.

Of the two games, the one he said he had most fun making was 魔界村, Ghosts ‘n Goblins. The home computer versions of Ghosts ‘n’ Goblins reached the top of the UK charts in 1986, so I will talk more about that one next year. When the magazine Beep! included Fujiwara in a set of quickfire developer interviews at the end of 1985, they asked him if he felt a special pride for any of the games he had created, and it was his other 1985 game he gave as an answer: 戦場の狼, “Wolf of the Battlefield”. Or, as Capcom called it in English, Commando.

Commando was not the first vertically scrolling shoot-’em-up to make you a soldier on a battlefield and let you move and fire in eight directions, with grenades as a secondary weapon. Taito’s Front Line had all of that in 1982, back in the days of shooters before Xevious (which itself had at one point been planned as a Vietnam war game before Namco took a sci-fi direction instead). Nonetheless, Fujiwara and Capcom added enough to the genre for Commando to become the template. They significantly upped the speed and complexity of the action, with enemies running and gunning in large numbers. And they carefully designed levels full of memorable set pieces – bridges, tanks, the enclosed gauntlets that end each level.

Commando was a big arcade success, and British companies were soon queueing up to try to buy the home computer rights, with Capcom president Kenzo Tsujimoto arranging a series of meetings in a London hotel. Tony Pomfret later told FREEZE64 that he and Ocean boss Jon Woods had agreed a deal in principle, only for Elite to go into the room next after them and outbid them. Steve Wilcox of Elite told Retro Gamer in 2005 that their successful offer had been for £65,000, which he came up with based on estimating sales of 100,000.

There was enough appetite for Commando that unofficial versions soon appeared too. Most notably, Sheffield-based Alligata Software released a Commodore 64 game called Who Dares Wins that was a little too daring in its similarities. Elite gained a legal injunction and Alligata withdrew it from sale within days. They replaced it with Who Dares Wins II, which had the same gameplay but took a slightly more original approach to level design and changed the player character’s outfit from blue to red. They got Who Dares Wins II out just before Commando, reaching #6 in the UK charts.

Around the same time as they were releasing Who Dares Wins, Alligata made programmer Chris Butler redundant. He made a move southwards to Elite Systems in Walsall, and they immediately put him to work on the official Commodore 64 version of Commando, supported by Rory Green and Chris Harvey on graphics and Rob Hubbard on sound. Contrary to a suggestion in Commodore User’s review of Commando, before programming it Chris Butler had not written Who Dares Wins for Alligata (Steve Evans had). There’s certainly a possibility that he may have gained some useful knowledge of that game to apply, though.

For the Spectrum version, Elite had programmers Keith Burkhill, who had previously worked on Gilligan’s Gold for Ocean, and Nigel Alderton, who had created Chuckie Egg as a teenager and by his own account was “big-headed” at the time as a result. Graphic design was by Karen Trueman and (again) Rory Green. With Elite’s huge investment in the Commando licence, their future was dependent on it succeeding, and that meant getting it out before Christmas. Alderton told Retro Gamer in 2015 of an intense but well rewarded development process where he and Burkhill were given less than three months to make the game and got to know each other fast, getting on well thanks to a shared level of experience.

Back on the Commodore 64, timing was even tighter for Chris Butler. He told Zzap!64 that “it was a real rush job because I started it in October and it had to be finished by November. It was a bit messy because I had so little time.” Worse was to come after he had finished the game, successfully designing and programming four different levels. “When Rob Hubbard came down he said that he needed about 6K for the music, and there wasn’t room. So Steve Wilcox, the man, said “Right, hack out level three”. It was more or less a disaster.”

That choice says something about the importance Elite placed on Rob Hubbard’s music, which once again reviewed well. “The music is particularly good” said Commodore User’s Mike Pattenden. In Zzap!64, Gary Penn called the music “the most impressive thing about Commando”, while calling the game “a very hurried conversion” and lamenting its flickering sprites (“It was the first time I’d split sprites” Chris Butler told the same magazine). Both reviews complained of the missing levels. 

On the Spectrum it had less hope of even superficially looking like the arcade game, but Elite did manage to include all the levels. Computer Gamer reviewed both versions and called the Spectrum version “a shadow […] of the C64 version”, but it got more positive reviews from Spectrum magazines. Sinclair User’s Nicole Segre was impressed by its “fast and furious action” and said that it was “exciting, challenging and guaranteed to keep you playing”. Alison Hjul provided Your Sinclair with the traditional, against-all-odds claim that it was “an almost exact copy of Commando, the arcade hit”. Crash was likewise impressed by the familiar details — “the highscore table is the same as the arcade one too, with its spinning letters and all that.” That reviewer ended their section with the advice that “If you want a game for Christmas, then look no further than this, it’s ********* amazing!”.

Lots of people did buy Commando for Christmas 1985. It replaced the Spectrum version of Elite (the game) at the top of the charts and then sat at #1 in the combined formats chart for five weeks in a row, covering the whole of December. It then returned to #1 twice more, first in January 1986 and then in April upon the release of the Amstrad CPC version. That one was programmed by the same pair as the Spectrum one, plus Simon Freeman. Amstrad Computer User reviewer Liz wrote that “the graphics are reasonably good, the sprites smooth and the sound adequate”.

Overall, Steve Wilcox’s prediction of 100,000 sales turned out to be a large underestimate. Commando did well enough to set Elite up for further success, and further Capcom conversions. “It made me a small fortune”, said Chris Butler. Spending big on the rights had paid off, although Ocean came up fast behind them with a fallback solution that will be the subject of next week’s post.

There would be many further imitators to come, so it’s worth thinking about Commando’s subject matter. Commando is far from the first game in this story involving guns. As a gameplay mechanism, shooting goes way back. But shooting spaceships or throwing grenades at giant ants doesn’t really feel the same as directly shooting people, even nameless people in a ludicrous action-movie-style one-man assault on an entire army. 

From forty years’ distance, Commando looks like a rather quaint version of that, despite shot enemies wiggling their arms and legs in agony before disappearing. It was even set in a carefully indistinct and nameless war and place. Some of the reviews at the time, though, show that acceptance of its approach was by no means a foregone conclusion. One Crash reviewer called it “horribly violent, and not much of an intellectual challenge”, a link made elsewhere as well. Alison Hjul’s Your Sinclair review ends with “Play it and blast away a few brain cells – yours and the enemies’!”. Before that, she brought the concept into question more directly. “If you’ve got a downer on mercenary militarism then give it a miss.” Games would soon push that a lot further.

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Sources:

• The man who made Ghosts ‘n Goblins, GlitterBerri, GlitterBerri’s Game Translations, 2012, translating an interview from Continue, 2003
• 59 Developers, 20 Questions – 1985 Interview Special, Shmupulations, 2014, translating a feature from Beep!, 1985
• The Butler did it!, Gary Penn, Zzap!64 No. 17, September 1986, accessed via the Internet Archive and also available via Def Guide to Zzap!64
• Ultimate guide: Commando, Graeme Mason, Retro Gamer No. 138, February 2015
• Are you Elite?, Martyn Carroll, Retro Gamer No. 13, May 2005
• The making of… Rambo with Tony Pomfret, Vinny Mainolfi, FREEZE64 No. 38, August 2020
• Britsoft: An Oral History, Alex Wiltshire, Read Only Memory, 2015
• Elite, Sham Mountebank, Where Were They Now?, 2022
• Commando, Kurt Kalata, Hardcore Gaming 101, 2019
• Screen Scene – Commando, Mike Pattenden, Commodore User No. 28, January 1986, accessed via Amiga Magazine Rack
• Zzap test – Commando, Zzap!64 No. 10, February 1986, accessed via Def Guide to Zzap!64
• Reviews – Commando, Computer Gamer No. 10, January 1986, accessed via Spectrum Computing
• Screen Shots – Commando, Alison, Your Sinclair No. 2, February 1986, accessed via Spectrum Computing
• Software – Commando, Nicole Segre, Sinclair User No. 47, February 1986
• Commando, Crash No. 24, January 1986, accessed via Spectrum Computing
• Review – Commando, Amstrad Computer User No. 19, June 1986, accessed via the Internet Archive

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