When Gary Bracey became a director at Ocean Software in 1985, computer-game adaptations of movies were few and far between. With his help, however, Ocean popularised film-to-game adaptations with the likes of Cobra, Top Gun and Platoon. What’s all the more impressive is that Gary would typically assess the potential of forthcoming big-screen attractions purely by reading their scripts. One that caught his eye was Orion Pictures’ RoboCop, a violent slice of gritty sci-fi that he thought had ‘videogame’ written all over it.
Ocean cofounder Jon Woods agreed, and thanks to being a relatively low-budget movie his firm was able to secure worldwide videogame rights across all formats for a very reasonable outlay. Of course, given that Ocean was a UK home-computer games publisher, its focus was on developing for the popular British micros. It didn’t yet have a presence in the American games market, and it wasn’t involved in arcade development, so an arrangement was made to sub-license the coin-op, pinball and certain US computer and console rights to the Japanese arcade developer Data East.
