Cobra
A licence's decay curve, in six months
Joffa Smith's 1987 Stallone tie-in for Ocean charts at #3 and falls away month by month — the standard shape of a film licence, and the opposite of how Match Day sold.
Cobra, the Sylvester Stallone film tie-in, programmed for Ocean by Jonathan ‘Joffa’ Smith — one of the games Your Sinclair named him as working on when it ran him as its castaway of the month.
Fast facts
- CRASH: 83%, issue 33 — confirmed against the magazine’s own index (issue 33, p28) and the rating panel in issue 33 (October 1986), p28.
- Programmer: Joffa Smith. Publisher: Ocean.
- Licence: the 1986 Stallone film.
- Known for: speed and colour on a machine that gave neither away cheaply.
Chart performance
CRASH Hotline charts, 5 appearances:
| Date | Position |
|---|---|
| Aug 1987 | #3 |
| Sep 1987 | #4 |
| Oct 1987 | #10 |
| Nov 1987 | #7 |
| Mar 1988 | #14 |
⭐ This is what a licence looks like in a chart. In at #3, and then down — 4, 10, 7, 14 — with no recovery. The game sells hardest the month it appears and then declines as the film recedes.
Set that beside Match Day, which entered at #9 and climbed to #3 four months later, then kept returning there for a year.
Two games, one publisher, opposite shapes. Cobra is bought because people know the film; Match Day is bought because people know somebody who owns it. A licence buys attention at launch and cannot renew it. Word of mouth is slower and compounds.
That is the clearest argument in this data for recording chart runs and not peak positions — both games peak at #3, and they are nothing like each other.
The programming
Cobra is remembered by Spectrum owners for how it moves. Joffa’s reputation rests on getting arcade pace and colour out of hardware with no sprites, no hardware scrolling and one colour pair per 8×8 cell, and Cobra is one of the two games — with Green Beret — that people cite for it.
The licence bought the sales; the programming is why anyone still talks about it.