He squinted to clear his vision, looking down the mound where Treasle lay flat in the brush. Christ, he had hit him. God, he had not wanted that, and the numbness was so overwhelming by now that he could never light the fuse before it nulled him. So poor. So ugly and poor. Then death took him over, but it was not at all the stupefying sleep, bottomless and murky, that he had expected.

So dies Rambo at the end of the 1972 novel First Blood by David Morrell, which alternates perspective between Rambo and police chief Treasle as their mutual campaigns of violence escalate. Army veteran Rambo is killed by Trautman, the former commander of the military school he trained at. As Canadian author Morrell later explained, “It’s an allegory. Trautman’s first name is Sam. He’s Uncle Sam. He’s the system that created Rambo, and that system destroys him”. Bringing a war machine back home brings war with it.

In 1982, First Blood became a movie. Rambo killed a lot fewer people along the way in that version, the better to be more sympathetic. It did not end with him dying, either. This was thanks to some combination of test audiences and Sylvester Stallone, depending which account you read. Then came the sequels, which essentially turned Rambo from American war machine (derogatory) into American war machine (complimentary). When Rambo: First Blood Part II came out in 1985 and further transformed David Morrell’s creation, he went along with it, and wrote the novelisation.

Also doing their best to adapt to changing circumstances in 1985 were Ocean Software. After all their success with Daley Thompson’s Decathlon and their agreement with Konami to convert their arcade games, Ocean had been confident of winning the rights for home computer versions of Capcom’s arcade hit Commando. Confident enough to have started planning how they would make them. Then Elite Systems won the rights out from under Ocean, just as they had done previously with Airwolf, which Ocean had got as far as advertising before finding that their agreement wasn’t as firm as they had thought.

Although Capcom claimed the choice of English name for Commando had nothing to do with the Arnold Schwarzenegger-starring film of that name that came out shortly afterwards, the game certainly had a lot of the action movie to it. It involves one man shooting his way through an entire army, after all. Never ones to miss the chance to be topical, Ocean saw an opportunity. Ghostbusters had been the big hit game of the previous Christmas and shown the potential for movie tie-ins. They might not have the rights to Commando, but they could get the rights to Rambo: First Blood Part II, a film which, as Commodore User put it, “already sounds like a number of computer games on the market”.

  • Rambo: First Blood Part II (Ocean, 1985, Commodore 64)
  • Rambo: First Blood Part II (Ocean, 1985, ZX Spectrum)

Apparently the company responsible for UK licensing for the movie went straight to Ocean based on their reputation. They still got the necessary setup into place late enough that, like Elite with Commando, they were racing against time to get their game ready before Christmas. Three months, Tony Pomfret recalled when he spoke to Freeze64. He and David Collier worked on the Commodore 64 version as the lead one. They watched a preview of the film (which they thought was “bloody marvellous”) and then plotted out how to turn it into a game. Commodore User’s preview reported “crude childlike drawings of Rambo and trees and weapons are scrawled in biro”.

Ocean gave the Spectrum version, meanwhile, to Platinum Productions. That was a Scottish company that Ocean had worked with a fair bit as part of a close relationship with U.S. Gold. Ocean’s owners had a 50% stake in U.S. Gold and had also agreed a deal to do the Spectrum conversions for American Commodore 64 games like Beach-Head, before promptly farming them out to Platinum. That explains why one early report in Crash said that Platinum were making Rambo for U.S. Gold. In the case of Rambo, where Platinum’s lead was David Anderson, the differences between the Spectrum and C64 versions are enough to show that they were far from working to convert a finished game. At best, they were working from plans and scraps of the Commodore 64 one, written in biro or otherwise.

  • Rambo: First Blood Part II (Ocean, 1985, ZX Spectrum)
  • Rambo: First Blood Part II (Ocean, 1985, Commodore 64)

When making Rambo, Collier and Pomfret worked in the Ocean offices with the arcade machine of Commando to hand.  Sure enough, Computer & Video Games, Your Computer and Commodore User all reviewed Rambo: First Blood Part II alongside Commando, directly comparing the two on the same page. While there are distinct differences between the C64 and Spectrum versions of Rambo, they have a similar relation to that inspiration. Rambo takes the basics of Commando, the running and the gunning, and strips them right back in order to find new ways to expand them. 

It adds elements of exploration, sacrificing the density of set-pieces to allow a more emergent approach. It also makes more of different weapon changes, making you seek out your machine gun and then disincentivising you from exclusively using it by having the noise attract more enemies. It also adds a helicopter-piloting bit, for a Ghostbusters-like approach of offering variety to compensate for any shortfalls in quality. For the Commodore 64, at least, Rambo the game also got its own top soundtrack drawing on the film’s, Martin Galway going “spooky and dark” influenced “by the night-time stalking-around scenes in the movie”. 

Your Commodore’s reviewer S.S. declared that “the quality of music is higher than that of the Monty Mole tune by Rob Hubbard”. That would have delighted Galway, who was keenly aware of the rivalry the two had as leading composers, even if they had yet to meet at this point. While saying the game might prove a little easy, that review called it “technically brilliant and also remarkably exciting, challenging and very addictive.” That was something of an outlier at the positive end, though.

  • Rambo: First Blood Part II (Ocean, 1985, Commodore 64)
  • Rambo: First Blood Part II (Ocean, 1985, Commodore 64)
  • Rambo: First Blood Part II (Ocean, 1985, ZX Spectrum)

Sinclair User’s Clare Edgeley reported that “my first impression was one of disappointment” before noting its retention of “the film’s unpleasant jingoism”. In Zzap!64, Julian Rignall said that “the sound is just about the only high quality aspect of the program” while Gary Liddon thought that Ocean “neglected the actual game somewhat”. Likewise, Computer & Video Games said that it had “a lot of elements of Commando […] but not enough real gameplay”. Playing it now, the small elements of additional depth are there, but don’t feel like they add enough to match up to everything Commando got right in its simplicity.

Rambo lost out to Commando in the chart too, sitting some way behind it before climbing up to #1 for a single week as 1986 began. At least, that was what happened on the combined formats chart that most magazines ran. When chart compilers GfK provided a history of UK Christmas chart-toppers in 2023, they instead used the individual formats chart with each computer’s version separated out. On that basis, it turns out, the Spectrum version of Rambo — the one without Martin Galway’s music and with a big section of the screen devoted to HUD and not the action — was the Christmas number one for 1985. Just as the Spectrum version of Ghostbusters had been for the previous year. Rambo: First Blood Part II may not have been the first choice of either Rambo’s creator or Ocean Software, but it was the right shape to blast its way to success regardless.

Gallup combined formats chart for week ending 04 January 1986, Popular Computing Weekly

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