The 1986 Commodore 64 version of Cobra – based on the Sylvester Stallone film of the same name – is infamous for its sheer awfulness. It is based on the more successful ZX Spectrum game, designed and programmed by the late Jonathan Smith, but has lost a great deal in translation to the C64.

The aim of the game is to jump, climb, punch, stab and shoot your way through various scrolling levels until you’re able to rescue fashion model Ingrid Knutsen from the clutches of the psychotic gang belonging to ‘The Night Slasher‘. What this basically boils down to is mindless run-and-gun action where you’re constantly getting stuck on ladders; constantly dying, and constantly being amazed by how poor this game is…

Cobra is badly-programmed with appalling graphics and gameplay and has very little going for it. It’s almost impossible to survive the onslaught of attacks from enemies for long enough to reach the end of the first level, never mind the remaining two. That is: unless you use a trainer…

C64 Cobra is one of the worst movie-licensed video games ever made, and also goes down in infamy as one of Ocean Software‘s worst ever releases. The game was produced by Jon Woods – one of Ocean‘s co-directors. I’m not sure what Mr. Woods was doing during the making of C64 Cobra, but ensuring that the game was of reasonable quality wasn’t one of them.

Unless you want to see how truly bad this game is, I would recommend giving Cobra a hard miss.

More: Cobra on Wikipedia
More: Cobra on CSDb