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 the USA. Still today it is 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”. And yet, all of…
Nobody in the 90s seemed to really care about the history of videogames: everyone just played them really. Truthfully though, back then the medium was still in its teenage years; it would be pretty unreasonable to expect people to start looking back and think about the evolution of the medium and the issue of preservation.…
Everyone had a favorite videogame shop as a kid, where plenty of happy – or perhaps, not-so-happy – memories took place. Maybe it was EG or a Game, if one is UK based, or perhaps a Gamestop, Blockbuster or a mom-and-pop shop even. As for me, well, most of my games, as a child, I…