"The best thing would be a parser with just one word:<br>
>BARMAN<br>
Barman: What?<br>
>BEER<br>
Barman: A beer for you.<br>
>MONEY?<br>
Barman: five bucks.<br>
>PAY<br>
Barman: Thanx.<br>
<P>
So, this series of sentences seems perfect to me,
maybe I'll use it to write a game."
<P>
The man who talks is Enrico Colombini, programmer from
Brescia (northern Italy), the pioneer of adventure
games in Italy -- the Don Woods of the Mediterrean,
to be clear. He has a curious aversion for the
sophisticated parser invented by Infocom. And that's
why he said that bizarre thing - the parser with just
one word. Fun, fantasy and easy plain work: no
complicated sentences and no NPCs to ask "What's
wrong." It's provocative, certainly.
<P>
The first game<br>
It's a boutade of the man who, in 1982, wrote the
first text adventure of Italian history: "Avventura
nel castello". "I didn't know Infocom games yet and,
certainly, that was a good thing. Had I played them, I
would have tried to emulate their parser ("put the red
sheet and the green one in the big draw, then close it
with the strange key"), things would have got really
complicated, I would've lost a lot of time, and maybe
I would've gave up. At the time I hadn't yet
discovered that easy things are, often, the best way
to gain victory, I needed a lot of years to understand
this, but that's another story."
<P>
Twenty years later, "Avventura nel castello" could still 
compete against most (if not all)
Italian adventure games. And at the time, without
exaggeration, the game - for its
quality - would have turned Scott Adams pale 
(but Scott Adams wrote a lot of games, and Colombini just five or six). "Avventura nel castello" was first released
for Apple II: at the beginning it was sold only in a
shop owned by a friend of Enrico, and then it was
distributed by editorial group "Jackson": "The sales
were never high, but the satisfaction was great
because a lot of players wrote to know more about the
game. With "Avventura nel Castello" and with the board
game "Melopoli" (a computer version of Monopoly) I
earned, if I remember right, three or four million.
The same as Scott Adams - but my millions were in lire,
his in dollars." In 1985 the MS-DOS version of the
game was released (the last edition is dated 1996). 
<P>
Italian parser<br>
But what is the origin of the bizarre proposal of the
"Parser with one word"? The origin is the italian
tradition of text adventure, I think. Only after the
arrival of Inform in Italy did people release games with
a parser based on more than a verb/noun pair. 
Italian players, especially the ones who don't know
English (and there are many), are not used to a
complex parser.  It sounds bad to their ears.
"Avventura nel castello" and Colombini's other games 
have a verb/noun parser. And the same is for
most of the games released in the eighties. "Avventura nel
castello" didn't have a large distribution because it
ran on the Apple and then on Ms-Dos, when
the most common home computers were Cbm64 and Spectrum.
A lot of people wanted to play that game but couldn't. There were also a lot of people having fun with Infocom games, but the problems were the language and the slowness of the Cbm. The most common non-Italian games were those of Scott Adams: not much text to translate, an easy parser, speed and, in some cases,
graphics (and graphics, whatever you think, means
audience). These games had a very large distribution
(more than "Avventura nel Castello") because the software piracy was everywhere: at the time I'd seen
an original game only nine or ten times. The rest
was a big exchange, under the tables but also over the
counters of the shops, of tapes (or floppy disks) with
cracked games. And in the videogames magazines
appeared the first columns with hints for adventurers
(in the golden age those columns became pages). 
<P>
The newspaper stands<br>
The adventures were still games for a small audience.
Things changed when they arrived in the newspaper
stands. Yes: the newsstands became gold mines for
adventurers. In 1985, the first issue
of a monthly publication called "Next Strategy" was
released: on the tape there were three graphic
adventures for Cbm (written by Roberto Tabacco and from
the no-better-known Hans Piu). If you play them today
the only pleasure comes from satisfying your
nostalgia, for the rest is a frustration: it's
impossible to say that these games have a parser. The
game understands only the right sequence of commands
that lead to victory: nothing out of the scheme, no
provision of answers (even silly ones) for wrong actions. We
are very far from "Avventura nel castello" and also
from Scott Adams. Regression? Maybe. To win it was not
enough to solve the puzzles; you had also to guess the
exact words in the mind of the author. Until
extreme things like a game who didn't understand the
word "follow" but only the word "track". Certainly there
are reasons for all this. At the time the standard (in
other countries too) was more or less that one. Nobody
dreamed of emulating Infocom: the magazine was
sold every month, and you could not expect that the
editor (who wasn't Bill Gates) would hire a team of
programmers and beta-testers. And all were happy at the
results, because the players were enthusiastic: and that was enough to 
continue without raising the budget (which was already very
high for such games). And there was another
reason. The review had a high price: eight or nine
thousand lire (roughly four or four and a half dollars).
Had the games been very easy, the line of people requesting a refund
would have been longer than the line of people ready to buy the next issue
with new games and the solutions of the old ones. The
strategy, instead, was to insert a very difficult
puzzle in one of the games, so the players had to buy
the next issue. 
<P>
More or less at the same level were the games of the
"Dream" series (Editions Fermont, first issue november
1985, in every issue three games for Cbm): they had
black and white graphics, retro style, and good and
onirics plots. In every issue there was a game without
graphics, to make the most of the memory of the Cbm
and offer more text and more puzzles.
 <p>
The Quill and higher quality<br>
The quality of the games (parser included) got better
with Bonaventura Di Bello. He, in his twenties, bought
by mistake a "Adventure: A planet of death" by Artic
Computing (while Colombini was hypnotized by Crowther
and Woods, authors of "Adventure"). A little time
later Di Bello discovered The Quill (an illegal copy,
of course, but then he bought an original one from England) and wrote a game on his Spectrum. He sent it to a
magazine called "Load'n'Run" and, in that moment,
began his fortune: "I was paid two hundred thousand
lire (one hundred dollars).  Another two and I would
have been able to buy a new Spectrum!". The editor,
Arscom, launched a new series: "Epic 3000", with three
games every month. Roberto Tabacco was the author of
the ones for Cbm, Di Bello wrote the ones for Spectrum
(with The Quill and The Illustrator). The first issue
was sold on april 1986. The games, not protected by a
antipiracy password (though they were in the following issues), were: "Ring", "Duca Lynce" and "Il galeone
scomparso" (Cbm), "Et in action", "L'occhio del
condor", "Il triangolo maledetto" (Spectrum). The
influence of the Level 9 games was clear.
In december the last issue of the magazine was sold; it 
then became "Viking" (first
issue: january 1987), with a new editor, "Edizioni
Hobby": Tabacco was no longer working there, and the
games (three, the same for Commodore and Spectrum)
were all written by Di Bello. Two months earlier
(november 1986) the "Edizioni Hobby" had launched the
series "Explorer" (three games, the same for Cbm and
Msx): here Di Bello ported to Commodore the Spectrum
games of "Epic 3000". Sometimes a game continued in
two or more episodes. The total of adventures written
by Di Bello is 74: he was able to write a game every
week and was paid five hundred thousand lire (250
dollars) per game. "It would have been wonderful to
live writing those games; it would have been the same
as living as a writer, or maybe better, because the
audience of text games was superb." The first game of
Di Bello, "Dimensione sconosciuta", is impossible to
find: "Today I would like to remember it, rewrite it
and release it online." Last three were never
released. "I remember the names, "New Pasqua" and
"Sorsi di terrore". The third one was a thriller with
the PC hiring a killer to kill him and let all pass
like a suicide. I wasn't the author, the author was
Marco Gobbi; I tried to contact him again some time
ago, but he's vanished." Most games, at the time, had
graphics, and there were people who released "single"
games, without thinking to launch a series. The
stories were always very short and the locations never
more than ten. The name of the characters, we'll never
understand why, were always anglophone (I don't
remember even one Italian one): Dust Hanter, Jack
Byteson, Jonathan Thompson, Harry O'Hara, Alan
Simmons.
<P>
Inside and out the system<br>
The parser still was verb/noun. But there were some
exceptions, above all in the single games or in the
short series, like the mystery stories edited by
Systems ("Gialli Commodore", just one game per issue).
In these cases, in fact, there was no hurry to release
a lot of games every month, the authors were not pros
like Di Bello, but people that had an idea for a
game, released it, and often vanished forever from the
scene of text adventures (just like Enrico Ragaini,
author of "Il mistero della piramide" for Cbm). The
Systems mystery stories were the integration of a
series of lessons to write text adventures published
by the magazine "Personal Computer" and "Commodore
Computer Club": those lessons were very good and in
them appeared, for the first time, the concept of
library with words about the theory of locations, of
the inventory and suggestions for an "intelligent"
parser.
 
The mystery stories by Systems were very well written
and, among the games of the time, are the most similar
to modern IF: yes, interactive stories. Like "Il
mistero di Zambesi Waters", by Sandro Certi and Franco
Todi.  The location is Africa and in the opening screen
there is a promise: "this game accepts sentences with
one or two words, with a maximum of NINE". It's
possible to type something like "Jump down from the
bus". But we are not inside a system: those are
predefined sentences that are good only for one
event, one puzzle. If, in another and not
predefinied situation, you type "Jump down", inevitably the
game says "I don't understand" (and not "Jump down
from what?"). We are still far from a sophisticated
parser, but we have good stories. We don't have a system
of verbs, like the ones offered by The Quill. It's not
strange that the games written by Di Bello with The
Quill were considered the best ones: if the author has
a system, a grill of verbs or sentences to dawn, he
can get good results with minimal effort. 
<P>
On the
tapes of "Explorer" there was the announcement: "In this
magazine you'll find a dossier to solve and to learn
to write adventure games". The editors understood that
a lot of people wanted to write their own games. To
write a good adventure, with an elementary parser, is undeniably easier than writing a good shoot 'em
up. So the market was open to this kind of experiment.
And the book "Scrivere un gioco di avventura sul
personal computer" (1986) by Enrico Colombini had great success. With the book was sold a tape with some
adventure game and the famous "Modulo Base", a system,
a grill of verbs to enlarge to create your own game
using Basic. I don't remember brilliant games written
using "Modulo Base"; I remember the ones of Colombini,
among them "L'Anello di Lucrezia Borgia",
"L'Apprendista Stregone" e "L'astronave condannata".
Di Bello too used the "Modulo Base" and here his
history as an author of text adventures meets the one
of Colombini: "I used Modulo Base to realize a sort of
The Quill for Msx. I used it to create a dark/light
routine (with timers for lamps or other light
objects), and other things offered by The Quill. Then
I tried to do the same with Amiga's Amos Basic, but it
was too late to launch text adventures again and the
project never took life. But I'm sure Enrico remembers
that night when I woke him to ask a suggestion-- I hope
he forgave me!".
<P>
In the meantime, you could find, in newsstands (of
course), an illegal italian version of The Quill. On
the magazines people announced "new amateur
adventure game", but without Internet the distribution
was difficult, above all the distribution of Apple
games, a home computer not much present in italian
houses. Only using the personal archive of Colombini,
today is possible to remember some interesting games.
Like the good "Catania Gions" (1985), wrote by three
men from Pisa, Fausto Daluiso and Giuseppe and Gianluca
Pomponi: it's a sort of Indiana Jones story with
graphics similar to the one of "Death in the
Caribbean". "I knew the three authors -- says Enrico --
when they asked me to write a plot for another game
and I gave them the script of "L'isola del Giaguaro",
but today we have just some demo pictures, since this
game was never completed". Blue Bottazzi wrote "Cappuccetto Rosso" (1987), a only text game
inspired by the famous fable for children. "La rapina
di Corsut" has, instead, a curious story. Wrote by
Luca Nosotti and Carlo Vellano in 1985, it tried to
enter a programmer competition, but the jury didn t
accept it because of the presence, in the game, of a
group of robbers. Maybe it's the only case of censorship in
the history of adventure games! Another game is
"L'uscita" by a little-known Ugo: it's a only text
adventure with interesting multiple choices (and
graphical map). Possibly there were some lost games (for
Cbm and Apple or Spectrum) that were better than the
ones sold. But maybe we'll never know.
<P>
The dark age<br>
The age of games sold in newspapers stands arrived at
the end with the last series: Epyx 3001 (editor
"Arscom", first issue january 1988). Every issue had
five or six games only for Cbm, but the sales were bad
and the series closed after six months. The years of
the dark age for text adventures are the same as in
the rest of the world. The games written at the end of
80s and at the beginning of 90s are few, the ones
sold nearly equal to zero. There were, however, some
bad attempts to realize games using well-known comic
characters like Diabolik and Dylan Dog, but the result
is some action adventure with many lows and nearly no
highs. One of the most interesting happens in 1990, when on the review Amiga Byte  appears "Demo Adventure", an adventure toolkit (written by Maurizio Giunti) that allows you to create games with a good parser ("attack orc with the sword") but, curiously, doesn't admit synonyms for the nouns (while it does for verbs). With this system, a guy from Imperia (northwestern Italy), Marco Vallarino, wrote nearly twenty text adventures: among them there is "Dracula", notable because offers a lot of locations (84). At the time there was also an innovative experiment by Alessandro Uber and Fabrizio Venerandi: they
created a text adventure for Mud, Necronomicom, played
via Videotel (a system of connected computers, used by
pubs and restaurants to attract guests) till 1994, and via Telnet
since 2001.
<P>
Revival<br>
Anyway, the revival begins in 1995 when Vallarino reopens the sipario with "Sfida all'ignoto" e "Il giardino incantato" and
Robero Barabino develops a very nice game (underrated):
"Alieni per sempre", a text adventure with graphics
that is a parody of the Tv serial "Star Trek" and bears structural similarities to "Wonderland" by post-Magnetic Scrolls. A curiosity: the first scene of
"Sfida all'ignoto" (a Ms-Dos game with an Infocom
statusline) is similar to the opening scene of
"Avventura nel castello": an airplane crash.
 
But the parser changes with the arrival of Inform
(today there don't exist games written with Tads or Hugo
because of the lack of italian libraries). Ilario
Nardinocchi realizes the first Inform italian
libraries, while Luca Melchionna and Barabino write
the first italian Inform games: "Zazie" (inspired by
the book of Queneau) and "Non sar  un avventura", a
funny game that takes place on a beach full of people
and girls to catch. The year is 1999. In the meantime,
Giovanni Riccardi rewrites the italian libraries,
opens an italian website for Inform and translates,
for didactical purpouses, "Adventure" and "Toyshop".
On the scene arrives then Tommaso Caldarola, who
writes the first game using the libraries of Riccardi:
"Uno zombie a Deadville", horror splatter winner of
the 2001 "Italian adventure of the year" (the first
edition of the competition, 2000, went to "Non sar 
un avventura"). A lot of people rediscovered
adventuress thanx to the newsgroup
it.comp.giochi.avventure testuali and to the website
www.ifitalia.cjb.net
<P>
But the parser old style does not vanish forever (and
maybe this is a good thing, who knows?). Not all
italian authors know english, the first hurdle to learning
Inform. So other games are released with the verb/noun
system: the series by Jois (finally a female author!)
and "Enigma" by Marco Vallarino, both for Ms-Dos. With
the revival there is, also, an operation nostalgia:
"Progetto Lazzaro" (www.progettolazzaro.org), a
website that hosts the old adventures sold in the
newsstand, with documentation and news.
<P>
The attraction for the puzzles<br>
Since 1982 changed authors, parser, systems, but not
puzzles, and maybe they'll never change. Italians love
puzzles, all the italian adventures are
puzzle-oriented and, in the reviews, the presence of
the puzzles is important to get an high valutation.
Italians don't have games like Photopia: the idea is
that adventures are games and games need to be
challenging. With or without the avveniristic one word
parser launched by Enrico Colombini.
<P>
Francesco Cordella, january/february 2002
(thanx to Enrico Colombini, Bonaventura Di Bello, Marco Vallarino,
Paolo Vece).