At Christmas 1985, the UK’s game charts saw a battle between two hit games along very similar lines. Elite Systems secured the rights to Capcom’s Commando arcade machine, and their home computer conversions of its top-down war action did extremely well for them. Ocean Software, sore at losing that opportunity, turned to Rambo: First Blood Part II and followed quickly behind Elite with a game that took very obvious inspiration from Commando. Six months later, they were back at it with rival takes on the same genre once more.

The similarities of the situation went further. Elite’s latest hit was the other game that Tokuro Fujiwara had developed parallel to Commando: Ghosts’n Goblins. It would make narrative sense for me to talk about that game first here, but the chart chronology dictates that I will post about it next week. Because this time, Ocean got their rival game out, and got it to the top of the charts, a week earlier. Unlike Rambo, it wasn’t their own devised response, but a conversion of an arcade hit in its own right, part of Ocean’s deal to release Konami arcade games under their Imagine label. It was Green Beret.

  • Green Beret (Konami, 1985, Arcade)
  • Green Beret (Konami, 1985, Arcade)

As per usual with Konami of this era, there is very little information available on the development of Green Beret. The context is noteworthy, though. In the middle of 1985, Capcom published those two Fujiwara arcade games in Japan, to much success. One had you as a soldier single-handedly taking on an army. The other took the Spartan-X/Kung-Fu Master genre of horizontally-scrolling game with enemies rushing you from both sides, and combined it with the old ladders style of platformer. In a 2003 interview, Fujiwara talked about how location testing new arcade games around that time was scary, as competitors could copy your ideas and get a game out within three months. 

Around two months after Ghosts’n Goblins came out in Japan, Konami, who Fujiwara used to work for, released their arcade game Green Beret. It took the Spartan-X/Kung-Fu Master genre of horizontally-scrolling game with enemies rushing you from both sides, combined it with the old ladders style of platformer, and had you as a soldier single-handedly taking on an army. It’s much more explicit in its setting than Commando, with the title placing you as a member of the US Special Forces, and compared to Ghosts’n Goblins it also hews closer to Kung-Fu Master, in that you mostly fight hand-to-hand, only occasionally getting projectiles. Nonetheless, the similarities meant that Ocean and Elite going head-to-head with their versions of the two games felt quite fitting.

  • Green Beret (Konami, 1985, Arcade)
  • Green Beret (Konami, 1985, Arcade)

As many of the British reviews of home versions of Green Beret ended up saying, there was also a lot in it that went back to Rambo: First Blood Part II, even if it was more the film than the game directly. There was its emphasis on the knife as the main weapon, as well as its story of a lone American behind enemy lines rescuing prisoners of war. For Green Beret the location in question was Russia, something Konami chose to make even more obvious the American release, calling it Rush’n Attack. Which neatly linked the title closer to Ghosts’n Goblins too!

Green Beret was an arcade success in Japan and the UK, and Ocean gave the job of converting it to home computers to largely the same people as previous Konami conversion Hyper Sports. On Commodore 64 that was Dave Collier, who had also worked on both Rambo and Yie Ar Kung-Fu in between, joined on graphics by Stephen Wahid and on music by Martin Galway. They were able to maintain most of the game’s features, and Galway was able to “beef up the music” with the C64’s sound chip. For ZX Spectrum, the conversion was by Jonathan ‘Joffa’ Smith, or as the backwards text on the game’s title screen would have it, Jonathan Simfff. With a bit of forward planning and no Christmas deadline, Ocean could take a bit more development time than they had given to Yie Ar Kung-Fu or Rambo.

  • Green Beret (Imagine, 1986, Commodore 64)
  • Green Beret (Imagine, 1986, Commodore 64)
  • Green Beret (Imagine, 1986, ZX Spectrum)
  • Green Beret (Imagine, 1986, ZX Spectrum)

Joffa Smith recalled the Spectrum Green Beret as having taken him roughly three months to make, working from a combination of the arcade machine and video of it. He pushed the Spectrum’s memory hard enough that there was no room left for music, or even for a menu that would return after a game over. He also had to have enemies share the same sprite ‘mask’ designed to stop the background showing through them. That was perhaps part of the motivation for the extent of monochrome sections in the actual playing area. 

Smith also added some individual touches of his own devising, like the ‘Stab to start’ message at the beginning, and the slightly odd decision to change the symbol for each of your remaining lives to a hammer and sickle. That one got specifically called out as a “tacky little detail” in ZX Computing’s review of the game, although it did say that “on the whole, Green Beret manages to avoid any of the nationalistic chest thumping that made Rambo and Raid Over Moscow controversial”.

  • Green Beret (Imagine, 1986, ZX Spectrum)
  • Green Beret (Imagine, 1986, ZX Spectrum)
  • Green Beret (Imagine, 1986, ZX Spectrum)

A similar attitude towards glorification of the US military was evident in many of the game’s reviews across both formats. Clare Edgeley in Sinclair User wrote “You’ll find Green Beret more challenging than Commando – another game in this reactionary Ramboesque Smash the Red Threat phase”. Commodore User’s Mike Pattenden mentioned how the game was “nauseatingly described” as Rush’n Attack in America. Others took a more mocking approach. Your Sinclair called the main character “Green Bert” and wrote that “Never in the field of micro conflict have so many been slaughtered by so few”. Zzap! 64 put it that “Green Hat is so amazingly HARD that Uncle Sam hasn’t even given him any weapons”.

Magazines’ review scores with their splits of, for example, graphics/sound/toughness/endurance/value (Commodore User) or graphics/playability/value for money/addictiveness (Your Sinclair) didn’t have space for evaluating narrative, never mind morals. So mostly they focused on other aspects of the game. The scrolling was impressively smooth in both versions, the action was quick and brutal, and the fact that both versions were even harder than the arcade game was largely met as a positive. The arcade game only throws its Soviet jumping ninjas at you at the very end of the first level, but on Imagine’s versions you have to deal with them from the start. Meanwhile, on the Commodore 64 version, those enemies who can fire their guns do so with terribly little warning.

  • Green Beret (Imagine, 1986, Commodore 64)
  • Green Beret (Imagine, 1986, Commodore 64)
  • Green Beret (Imagine, 1986, Commodore 64)

Computer & Video Games called Green Beret “fast furious and terribly addictive”. “The game is easy to get to grips with yet offers plenty of interesting action” said Peter Luke in Your Computer. Even a Crash reviewer who wrote that “the arcade game isn’t exactly the best game I’ve played” went on to concede that “Imagine have done a pretty good job with the conversion”. Mike Pattenden in Commodore User wrote that “it’s all here, with every aspect packed in to the 64K of the Commodore”. He did end on one contrary note, though. “I’d like to see something new done with the 64 for a change”. The people buying computer games didn’t agree yet on that. Green Beret ended up as the UK’s fourth best-selling game of 1986. Ocean were doubtless especially pleased that fourth was a couple of places ahead of Elite’s rival game.

Gallup combined formats chart for week ending 14 June 1986, Popular Computing Weekly

Top of the charts for week ending 14 June 1986

UK games: Green Beret (Konami/Imagine, Various)

Japan games: 魔界村 / Ghosts’n Goblins (Capcom, Famicom)

UK films: The Jewel of the Nile

UK singles: Doctor & the Medics – Spirit in the Sky

UK albums: Genesis – Invisible Touch

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