Jonathan 'Joffa' Smith
Joffa — Green Beret, Mikie, Cobra
Known to everyone as Joffa: the Ocean programmer behind Green Beret, Mikie, Cobra and Firefly, who left with colleagues to found Special FX and kept making Ocean's games from outside it.
Jonathan Smith — “Joffa” to everyone, including the magazines — wrote arcade conversions for Ocean and Imagine, then left with colleagues to form Special FX in Liverpool — a studio that promptly signed a deal to keep making Ocean’s games. CRASH laid the whole arrangement out when Firefly came out:
Special FX has signed a deal with Ocean to handle the business side of its releases, and this month’s Smash Firefly is the first under that arrangement… the Liverpool-based development house’s boss Paul Finnegan and Firefly programmer Jonathan Smith are both ex-Ocean men. Smith’s previous Ocean/Imagine credits include Green Beret and Smashes Cobra and Hypersports.
Your Sinclair ran him as its castaway of the month: “Jonathan ‘Joffa’ Smith, programmer of such classics as Green Beret and Mikie. He’s currently furthering the cause of world peace by working on Cobra and Terra Cresta for Ocean.”
Fast facts
- Known as: Joffa — the name the press used, in quotation marks, as though it needed no explanation.
- At Ocean/Imagine: Green Beret, Mikie, Cobra, Hypersports, Terra Cresta, Batman.
- At Special FX: Firefly (a CRASH Smash), Hysteria, and work on the RoboCop licence.
- Colleagues there: Paul Finnegan running it, Tony Pomfrit (Rambo, Daley Thompson’s Decathlon) also ex-Ocean, and Jim Bagley.
Leaving, and not leaving
The Special FX story is the most instructive thing here, because it is a pattern, not an anecdote.
A publisher’s best programmers leave. They do not leave the publisher’s work — they set up a studio a few miles away and contract back to it, with the publisher handling “the business side”. Everybody gets something: the developers get independence, ownership and better terms; the publisher keeps the people and loses the payroll, the management and the risk.
That arrangement is now how most of the games industry is organised, and here it is being invented in Liverpool in 1988 and explained to readers as news. CRASH’s phrasing — “a fling with Software Projects”, “future projects for Ocean include the RoboCop film licence” — treats a studio’s publisher relationships as the interesting fact about it, which by then they were.
Who wrote Gutz
Smith also resolves a small puzzle raised in the Jim Bagley entry.
CRASH’s review box credits Gutz to “Ocean/Special FX… Authors: Jim Bagley and Chas Davies”. A reader’s letter to the same magazine lists Gutz among Jonathan Smith’s games. Both looked like sources in conflict.
They are not. Bagley and Smith were at the same studio, working for the same publisher, on adjacent projects — so a fan naming the people behind a Special FX game and a credit box naming the two who wrote that particular one can both be right about the same cassette. The conflict was an artefact of reading each source as if it were a complete record.
The programmer as a personality
The castaway feature is the tell. Your Sinclair is not asking Joffa about compilers; it is asking him for his eight favourite games, in a parody of Desert Island Discs, on the assumption that readers want to know what he likes.
That only works if the readership already knows who he is — and it did. A nickname printed in quotation marks with no gloss is a magazine saying “you know him”. For a few years in the mid-eighties the people who wrote Spectrum games were, to their audience, something close to famous, and Joffa is the clearest case of it.
His reputation rests on getting the machine to do what it visibly should not: smooth scrolling, colour where colour was expensive, arcade pace on hardware built for none of it. Cobra and Green Beret are the ones people still cite.
⚠ Joffa died in 2010. That is not recorded anywhere in this library — the corpus ends long before — and it is noted here because the people who could still be asked about this era are a shrinking resource.
Why he matters
Smith is an early case of the studio breaking away — the structural change that turned publishers into financiers and put the making of games into independent hands.
He also carries a caution about this Vault’s method. “Jonathan Smith” is a common name, and the prose scan counts him in issues where the Jonathan Smith on the page is a reader in a high-score table in Newport. The 29-issue figure that first surfaced him is inflated; the evidence that stands up is the CRASH news piece naming his employer, his colleagues and four of his games.