This is INSERT COIN, our brand new video series dedicated to the storied history of the arcade business. Join Robert Johnson as he looks at the best and worst of arcade coin-ops every Thursday. What is he talking about this week?
It's a laserdisc game, of course. Find out what happened when Robert looked behind the Cobra Command curtain!
I have incredibly mixed emotions about Cobra Command. Not the normal opinion of like or dislike that you normally have for a game, but a mix of wonder, excitement, remorse and disappointment. I remember being a small child in my favorite place in the world -- Chuck E. Cheese. There's no modern day equivalent for the late '80s Chuck E. Cheese. Not GameWorks, not Dave & Busters and certainly not Chuck E. Cheese in its current bastard form.
Like ancient Rome, Chuck E. Cheese ruled its coin-operated empire without equal. The ticket redemption games were limited and stuffed into a corner; kept away from the real video games. There was pizza and soda for us kids, and cheap beer and wine for the adults. If you run past the Super Mario vs. Duck Hunt and take a turn at the four-player Ninja Turtles funfest, you would have found a sit down, covered cabinet that encased Cobra Command. It was a laserdisc game that looked and sounded unlike anything my little eyes had seen up to that point. It played like Airwolf and it looked like M.A.S.K., two of my absolute favorite things in the world back then.
I was thrilled to pump quarter after quarter into the game and lose helicopter after helicopter, due to the game demanding reflexes faster than my little ten year old body could muster. Even when my pilot died, he was honored with a splendid full-motion video cut-scene.
For all my love for the game, I never got very far. Except one day something extraordinary happened. I remember having only a few gold tokens left in my pocket, so I decided to see if I could get further than the first level. I put my token into the slot and heard a "clink." The type of "clink" that could only be made by metal on metal contact. Even at that early point in my life, I had played hundreds of arcade games and I never heard such a sound. And to this day, I've never heard it again. My eyes quickly and instinctively followed my hands to the coin drawer.
I found my token; it was behind the unlocked door. The employee must have cleared the box and forgot to lock it. My hands froze; afraid to reclaim the credit. I looked left, I looked right. The coast was clear. I greedily took the token and jammed it into the slot. The game made its familiar digitized scream letting you know that more credits had been accepted. As I played, failed and added more credits (actually the same credit the game expelled from its bowels), something not so wonderful happened: The game lost its charm. No longer was my mind occupied by pattern recognition and reaction time, but how fast I could put that single token back into the game before the continue counter expired.
As I finished the game, I felt underwhelmed by the ending and laserdisc games in general. I realized that the only profitency required was memorization of the game's limited action sequences. I had looked behind Cobra Command's curtain and I was not impressed. I found my grandfather, who brought me, and asked him if we could leave. He was surprised that I made such a request, but him being not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, we made our way to the parking lot. I took on some guilt that night, and I left a bit of my wonder and innocence at that Cobra Command game.
