The human body is not perfect. Not only it is extremely prone to failure, but it also doesn’t last very long before it starts acting up and needing fixes and patches. We can rebuild it, new and improved. We have the technology, we have the know-how, and especially, we have Mad Doctor on Commodore 64.…
While it is universally recognized that games are not a “boys only” club, especially nowadays, it is difficult to deny an originally predominant male presence. Today, the situation is – fortunately – quite different, so much so that in certain countries, female gamers are quite more numerous than their male counterpart. Thus, it is important…
If there is one thing to be learned from many of the stories of Italian software houses is that developing games in the 80s was quite difficult. But even harder was finding a publisher, as there was no way anybody could find a public with DIY. In researching the history of Idea Software and the…
The European gaming market in the 80s, or rather, the global market was very much different to that of today. While perhaps stating the obvious, it is important to keep mind considering this article will analyze an era which we could define, generally, as “pre-globalization”. Indeed, forty years ago, well before the digital revolution and…
In the early 80s, the industry was quite populated by women game developers, while not as many as their male counterparts, there were probably more than one might think today. Her names can be easily found in several of the magazines that, in the early 80s, would publish games sent in by programmers. Most of…
Everyone can identify that one definitive moment, the tiny magic second when a game managed to turn them from a casual part-timer into a full-time passionate gamer. Perhaps that passion, over the years, has been replaced by something else, but that hardly factors in this discussion. What matters is that mystical moment where everything else…
Shadowfire is still among the most celebrated home computer titles released in the mid Eighties, produced by then-young newcomer British studio Denton Designs (the Home of Happiness?), it also was (apparently) the first commercially released title where Steven Cain did the design. He developed one of the first turn based strategy/adventure games to feature an…
From its humble beginnings in Francesco Carlà’s private home, seen in Part I, Simulmondo managed to merge talent and business into a successful company which grew almost bigger than the size of a developer like Electronic Arts at the time. From 1992 on, because of the CEO’s stubbornness in continuing to pursue the selling on…
Throughout 2000 years of human history, since mankind understood it was possible to package and sell a work of art, a single struggle has resisted, immortal, rearing its ugly head time and time again: the artist against the system. It’s a timeless tale, used in books and screenplays, that of the desperate toil of artists…
Futuristic sports have been a moderately successful gaming genre, during the whole of the 80s and early 90s, with the Bitmap Brothers’ Speedball II being probably the final great hurrah of this curious sub-genre of sports titles. But what about earlier titles, like Rocket Ball? Surely enough there have been some exceptions, even in the…