Does this game-of-the-movie capture the coolest parts of the film? Was its development time (probably around three months) long enough to create a competent computer game? Are the graphics and sound appealing? Those were the kind of questions that coverage of licensed movie games in the 1980s British games press usually set out to answer. Not, generally, “is it morally correct to make a game of this movie to begin with?” Platoon was a bit different.

Film adaptations had been a consistent source of hits for Ocean Software, with Rambo: First Blood Part II reaching the top of the UK charts, and Top Gun and Short Circuit being hits too. As Ocean software manager Gary Bracey explained in Chris Wilkins and Roger M. Kean’s history of Ocean, generally “we got the game out well after the film was released as we’d wait to see if it was going to be a box-office success. If it was, then we had to go round knocking on doors, saying we’d like to license your film, please, and maybe we’d get it out in time for the video release if we were lucky”’

  • Rambo: First Blood Part II (Ocean, 1985, ZX Spectrum)
  • Rambo: First Blood Part II (Ocean, 1985, ZX Spectrum)
  • Top Gun (Ocean, 1986, ZX Spectrum)
  • Top Gun (Ocean, 1986, ZX Spectrum)
  • Short Circuit (Ocean, 1987, ZX Spectrum)
  • Short Circuit (Ocean, 1987, ZX Spectrum)

Platoon depicted a view of the hell of the Vietnam War from the perspective of a new American soldier. It came out in the US at the end of 1986, but didn’t make it to the UK until the end of April 1987. By that time it had won Best Picture at the Oscars, and it became a box office success here, climbing to the top of the chart and staying there for five weeks. Ocean first got involved well before that, licensing the rights before the film was finished. “Oliver Stone was a hot director at the time and the word from the US was that this was going to be a biggie”, Bracey told Retro Gamer in 2017. Ocean still ended up releasing their Platoon game to coincide with the video release (complete with the new idea of arranging cross-promotion between the two) but they got other benefits from being early.  

“For some reason the Americans wouldn’t touch it. We took it all, we took the world rights on all formats because no one wanted it” explained Bracey. Where the Americans apparently didn’t see that Platoon could be turned into a popular computer game, Ocean did. Perhaps it was partly the UK’s national distance from the war. Though American board game company Avalon Hill did acquire the rights to make a board game version of Platoon in 1986. Avalon Hill would have been a familiar name to some British computer game players, having released a run of computer war games in 1983 and 1984 which had been moderate hits on the specialised chart for Atari 8-bit computers.

With Ocean planning for their Platoon, they sent Simon Butler to a special screening of the movie in London “months before release” (presumably meaning the UK release). The initial reaction Butler remembers having perhaps also tallies with why others didn’t pick it up. “How the hell was I going to translate the level of gore and dismemberment to a youthful audience on an 8-bit machine?”

Simon Butler and his housemate Mark R. Jones set to work storyboarding a game. Butler told Retro Gamer that he “started breaking the movie down into its various elements, trying to keep as much of the flavour as possible.” Though it’s clear that many of the grimmest and most consequential moments of the film — members of the platoon committing war crimes, the message concerning one of their victims that “she’s a fucking human being, man!” — did not make it in to the game.

  • Platoon (Ocean, 1988, Commodore 64)
  • Platoon (Ocean, 1988, ZX Spectrum)
  • Platoon (Ocean, 1988, Amstrad CPC)

Ocean ended up with the idea of having the game split into several entirely different sections with their own visuals and gameplay: a side-scrolling jungle section with a bit of Joe Blade to it, a first-person tunnel crawler with a map, a night-time shooting gallery, and a simplified Commando/Rambo shooter. Butler and Jones exchanged and iterated ideas, with Jones contributing the image of an enemy rearing up out of the water in a tunnel, something that got used in the second section. For this, he took inspiration from 3D Monster Maze on the ZX81.

Ocean’s in-house team set to realising the vision on the Commodore 64, overseen by Butler. The team included teenage programmer Zach Townsend, who colleague Paul Hughes described as “a nice lad, who was massively confident in his own ability — sometimes a little too much!”. Townsend had never programmed on anything other than the Commodore 64. Artist Andrew Sleigh, on the other hand, had got his job at Ocean after an application filled with Spectrum graphics, then “turned up on day one and they took me over to my desk and said, “Here’s a Commodore 64.” A what? I’m doing what?“ Between them and sprite artist Martin McDonald, they introduced sprite overlays for more detailed characters, with inspiration from Odin’s Heartland.

  • 3D Monster Maze (J. K. Greye, 1981, ZX81)
  • 3D Monster Maze (J. K. Greye, 1981, ZX81)
  • 3D Monster Maze (J. K. Greye, 1981, ZX81)
  • Platoon (Ocean, 1988, Commodore 64)
  • Heartland (Odin, 1986, Commodore 64)
  • Heartland (Odin, 1986, Commodore 64)
  • Platoon (Ocean, 1988, Commodore 64)

While Ocean were making more of their games in-house, they still weren’t done with contracting out. The Spectrum and Amstrad versions of Platoon were the work of Choice Software in Northern Ireland, who had handled various other Ocean games including the Amstrad version of Rambo: First Blood Part II. Sean Pearce was the main programmer, and remembered using a lot of common library code between the Spectrum and Amstrad versions. He also remembered Gary Bracey flying over to look over their shoulders as they reached the final stages of making their versions, ahead of Platoon’s delayed release early in 1988. Choice would go on to make 16-bit computer versions of Platoon too.

With Ocean’s wide-ranging rights, they were also able to get Sunsoft to make a NES version of Platoon for them, and one which much more closely resembled the computer versions than, say, Jaleco’s NES version of Monty on the Run. Sunsoft’s team included program director Hiroaki Higashiya and music programmer Akita Takeuchi; both would later take lead roles on Sunsoft’s ports of Lemmings for the SNES and Mega Drive. Sunsoft’s conversion of Platoon ended up opening doors for Ocean outside of the UK. According to Gary Bracey, afterwards “we had the credibility of Platoon and it changed everything. After that many more film studios listened to us”.

  • Platoon (Sunsoft/Ocean, 1988, NES)
  • Platoon (Sunsoft/Ocean, 1988, NES)

When the NES version came out in the US later in 1988, it got some newspaper coverage. Minnesota’s St. Cloud Times started their article with the line “Vietnam has gone from national trauma to video game” (with Vietnam apparently not the nation in question), and went on to suggest that “acceptance could be a problem”. “It’s too sad” they reported one player as saying when trying Platoon out at the Consumer Electronics Show. “They took a film that was so moving, and they made a game out of it”.

Even with Britain lacking the same sense of trauma, a lot of our games critics felt it necessary to consider similar issues as part of their reviews. As Eugene Lacey wrote in Computer & Video Games, “most people thought it was a joke when Ocean said they were coding a game around Platoon — reasoning that it was one thing churning out naff film tie-ins of James Bond and like, but quite another thing to cheapen such a good and “serious” film. (Domark had recently published a game of The Living Daylights, which reached #12 in the UK chart). 

Lacey went on to write that “when you examine the whole package […] you have to acknowledge that the subject matter has been treated extremely sensitively”. That judgement on sensitivity appears shortly after using a racial slur for Vietnamese people in his review. It’s a slur which appears throughout the film Platoon, a demonstration of dehumanisation in progress before its characters take that further still. The same word also appears as a label for enemies in numerous places in the concept sketches for the game Platoon, something that went unmentioned in the 2017 Retro Gamer article which reproduced the sketches. It’s hard to argue that the game conveys any messages about dehumanisation with the same clarity as the film.

  • Platoon (Ocean, 1988, Commodore 64)
  • Platoon (Ocean, 1988, Commodore 64)

Similarly to Computer & Video Games, Games Machine concluded that “It is to Ocean’s credit that they have produced a game that, given its need to entertain and thrill, still manages in some degree to convey the film’s sad feeling, and the claustrophobia of the dense Vietnamese jungle”. Steve Jarratt in Zzap! 64 mentioned the likelihood of objections that “the violence is too strongly depicted” but countered with the defence that “it’s one of the few games where you actually feel that you’re fighting for your life, rather than for the glory of it”.

Many others were less positive. Crash wrote that “Ocean’s claim that the game, like the film, ‘focuses on the tragedy of war’ is a bit dubious — it’s primarily concerned with success through killing.” Andy Wilton’s review in ACE is notable for focusing on the treatment of the game’s enemies (and not using slurs for them at any point). “The game does trivialise a serious subject, and you may find some aspects of it stick in the throat: the Viet Cong weren’t Martians or robots to be shot out of hand, and it’s disturbing that they should be treated as such.” 

  • Platoon (Ocean, 1988, ZX Spectrum)
  • Platoon (Ocean, 1988, Amstrad CPC)

Chris Jenkins in Sinclair User much more likely had the American side in mind when writing that “not long ago people just a little older than the average SU reader were fighting and dying in Vietnam”. His conclusion, riffing on the film’s tagline: “I liked the game, it’s well presented, neatly programmed and as the manual claims ‘packed with fun and excitement’ — just like the Vietnam war itself, I suppose. The first casualty of war may be innocence, but it seems the first casualty of marketing is good taste.” He also still felt the need to start off his review by saying that Platoon was “as good a game as [Ocean have] done for some time; in shockingly bad taste, it has to be said, but a good game nonetheless.”

Rachael Smith’s review for the never knowingly reverent Your Sinclair tackled that awkward split head on. After writing that “as anybody who has ever forked out for a ‘game-of-the film’ knows — the first casualty of licensing deals is innocence!” and cutting right to the point with “Platoon (the game) turns you into just the sort of killing machine that Platoon (the movie) made you so queasy about”, the review takes a hard turn. “Enough of the moralising, because some of you won’t give a rubber grenade for anything other than how well it plays”. (That, it turns out, was disappointing too.)

Whatever the morality, Platoon the game proved another chart #1 success for Ocean, and proved a template for their future movie games. Not in its subject matter, but in its structure. Interviewed for the Ocean history book, Gary Bracey said that “we did it with Platoon whereby we started to create these multi-sectional games, which I don’t think anyone else had been doing”. Though outside of games based on specific films, the reviews in both Sinclair User and Your Sinclair correctly noted that Platoon bore some resemblance there to Beach-Head. Which was also an Asian-set multi-stage war game which ended up with a confrontation with a man in a bunker.

Reflecting on Platoon and its reviews to Retro Gamer, Simon Butler said that “story, narrative and morals were virtually impossible on the machines of the day. Reviews stated it was one of the best movie tie-in titles, so perhaps we did succeed.” The way that those reviews struggled to fit their objections within a framework of graphics/playability/value for money/addictiveness wasn’t new, and was one more thing about Platoon that pointed the way to the future.

Gallup combined formats chart for week ending 20 February 1988, The Guardian

Top of the charts for week ending 20 February 1988

UK games: Platoon (Ocean, Various)

Japan games: Dragon Quest III (Enix, Famicom)

UK films: Fatal Attraction

UK singles: Kylie Minogue – I Should Be So Lucky

UK albums: Terence Trent D’Arby – Introducing the Hardline According to Terence Trent D’Arby

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