Cobra Command 25 years later

It’s simply amazing that popular laser disc games from the 80’s are reappearing in the Iphone developers wares. Cobra Command was a spastic shooter with highly advanced graphics for its time. The original arcade game used a huge Laser Disc to play out scenarios and cut scenes. Now it is out in the iPhone app store.

Since the iPhone is as much a multimedia device and a gaming ystem, and that’s exactly what those old laserdisc coin-operated games used to be. Enthusiasm for games like Cobra Command has been overwhelming, Expect to see many more like this make their way onto the iTouch/iPhone platform.

According to the developers of Cobra Command for iPhone when they first saw the original $50,000 dollar arcade machine. It was like seeing a time capsule, if you can imagine being teleported back to an arcade full of these glowing machines.

The developers chose to upgrade the controls and mechanics rather than doing a straight port. Which makes a lot of sense. What a task they had to complete. To take a $50,000 arcade relic and cram it into something that fits in your pocket.

Development of the title was not as easy as it might seem, if it were not for the dedicated fans that help track down a working machine, this project would have been immensely more complex. Even with the original game, there was still no code, or graphics, or design build specs. The team had to run through and explore every possible location and experience over 300 different ways to die.

While the Cobra Command game was being played a trio of recording devices captured frame by frame sequences. which were later adjusted to compensate for the new mobile platform and wide screen tracking. Some might say that this was more difficult to reverse engineer the game than to start from scratch. Starting from scratch may have been the easy way to go, but they sure managed to capture the thrill of the initial game with the upgraded controls making it a winner.