There is no Arnold or anything on the cover. On other games based on his movies he is usually on the cover.
The game is just you alone against an entire army. It could be based on the end of the movie, but if it is it is missing a lot of the rest of the movie. But maybe that was just the simplest game to make. It is an early NES game, so not very sophisticated yet. Also there is a 2600 game that is pretty much the same thing.
So it could be based off the movie, but it is such a generic name I could believe it is just a coincidence they have the same name. And the one man against the entire army is pretty common in videogames. And if indeed it were based on the movie, I would expect more advertisement of that fact. But I am not really sure.
It was originally an arcade game, and it had nothing to do with the movie (yeah, I wondered that too at the time).
Given the number of combat-themed video games and movies that have “commando” in the title, this isn’t all that unusual. The fact that a movie and a game with the exact same title were released the same year was nothing but an amazing coincidence.
If you’re thinking of the game named after a real-life combat, that would be Contra, which took the name (and nothing else) from the anticommunist forces in Nicaragua.
Hogwash. The whole reason we secretly sold arms to Iran was to bolster the resistance against the alien invasion. All of Central America would be covered in facehuggers now, otherwise. It’s just a pity we couldn’t salvage any of the spread rifle technology after the conflict ended.
Except in European markets, where all the Contra games were marketed under the title Probotector, and the commando sprites (and human enemies) were replaced with robots.
I kind of wondered about this issue too, but I didn’t personally confirm to myself if it was or not. Makes me wonder, does the movie Commando have a game? (I tried to find something and didn’t have luck so I guess it doesn’t?)
E.T. had pretty much killed the video game tie-in market for at least a decade, and such products generally had a very poor reputation for quality to begin with.
Back to the Future: The Game was pretty decent. Good voice acting, good story. Christopher Lloyd, Michael J. Fox, and Claudia Wells returned to voice characters, although Fox didn’t voice the teenaged Marty. A soundalike for Fox voiced that role.
Rambo came out in 1987. It was actually pretty good.
Predator came out the same year. It was not so good. Both movies were Commando-ish.
That’s just barely scratching the surface for NES games based on movies. Goonies, Jaws, Friday the 13th, Star Wars, Nightmare on Elm Street, Karate Kid, Back to the Future, who Framed Roger Rabbit… If a movie was popular it probably had an NES game.
If you insist that E.T. killed the video game movie tie-in market for “at least a decade” (so, 1992 or later?) you have clearly come from a different timeline than the rest of us. Unlike your universe, in this universe it never got blunted. That game may have hurt the video game industry for 4-5 years, but by the time the NES was taking over North America in 1986-87 it was full of games based on movies.
Most likely the reason why Commando didn’t get a game was because it wasn’t that big of a hit. Don’t get me wrong, it was a successful movie financially and even had mixed-to-good critical reviews (it’s often mentioned as the template for the 80s action film) but wasn’t as big of a hit as most of the movies that did get licensed to games (see the games I previously mentioned). Of course some absolute bombs became games (Hudson Hawk pops into mind) but those are more examples of people trying to make games for movies they expect to be successful before they tank at the box office. And in the case of Hudson Hawk, they’d developed the NES game and were working on an SNES version but the SNES version was scrapped when the movie flopped.
I loved Goonies II, one of my favorite games for the NES. There were a number of decent ones. Willow was also good, and Alien 3. And Batman (based on the Tim Burton film) was very successful on the NES, considered by many to be the best superhero game for that platform. Okay, that’s a low bar, sure, but it was given pretty high rankings in reviews, especially for its high challenge level.
Then you are in disagreement with many players and game reviewers. Some of those games were hits. Most of the games were trash, absolutely, but not all of them.
Batman: AA is not based on a movie. It takes inspiration from a lot of the Batman media, but is most closely tied into A Serious House on Serious Earth, if anything.