Sweltering summer of ‘92. Italian director Gabriele Salvatores is shooting Puerto Escondido, together with actors Diego Abatantuono and Fabrizio Bentivoglio. Taking a break from the set, the three sit around a table for a quick match of Soccer on NES. As the game is finished, the console turned off, suddenly Diego turns and exclaims: “I…
In the 90s, Italian software houses struggled: from Simulmondo to Trecision, everyone was trying their hardest to stay afloat. The Italian market, despite the overall okay sales numbers, was always small, providing little funds and visibility to those that tried their hand at developing games. Also, even after 1993, piracy was still very much a…
I had the pleasure of speaking to John Holder, founder of the company Leader, in 1987, among the major publishers of video games in Italy. John would then leave the company in 2009, with Leader then closing down in 2012. For the sake of the interview, I was curious to ask him about what was…
After its first steps in a difficult industry plagued by piracy, as observed in the second part of the retrospective, Trecision managed to release two titles internationally, Nightlong and The Watchmaker, but crisis seemed to strike the studio between 1999 and 2000. With the overall idea of making a fully 3D adventure taking a long time to…
Liguria, on the western part of Italy and resting close to France, is home to several immensely popular culinary specialties, like pesto, and wordly-celebrated landmarks the likes of Cinque Terre and, naturally, Portofino. Along with being home to Dynabyte software and, years later, Artematica, the coastal region was also the birthplace of another important software…
In our current gaming discussion, questions about the value of “interactivity” seem to have taken a backseat. With Virtual Reality becoming an affordable and – mostly – reliable technology, the “headset and controllers” combination seems to be the end-all for interactive experiences. Not unlike the future imagined by writers and directors in the 80s and…
Throughout 2000 years of human history, ever since mankind understood how 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: the desperate toil of a striving artist to…
In the history of Italian videogame development, point’n’click adventure games are, perhaps, the quintessential genre; the love for solving riddles might indeed be stronger than that for soccer and wine. While Sierra Entertainment adventures struggled to find a market in Italy, mainly because their titles were rarely translated and fairly difficult to approach for a…
It is fascinating how the history of video games tends to be skewed towards a USA-centric narrative. Still, to this day, it is relatively easy to come across articles – written by Italians of all people – that keep on mentioning the “console wars” in the 90s or the “great video game crash of 1983”,…
Very few people seemed to care about the history of video games in the 90s: everyone just played them really. Truthfully though, back then the medium was still in its teenage years; it would be rather unreasonable to expect people to start looking back and think about the evolution of the medium, let alone on…