In the new season just released of Black Mirror (don’t worry, there is no spoiler) there is an episode, Playshing, who tells of a programmer of the eighties who realizes a video game, Thronglets, and is set in the same narrative universe as Bandersnatch (it was the interactive episode where the viewer decided the protagonist’s choices). Thronglets are small creatures (a sort of tamagotchi) of which the player must take care of, but they are a form of real digital biology (in the fiction).
In general in the series and in the film (as Redy Player one by Spielberg) we are used to seeing programmers from the eighties who realize video games, alone, because in the 1980s it was like this. Even the Activision team was made up of a few people, but a single person could become rich thanks to a video game of which the code wrote (there were few kilobytes, it was not needed a team of hundreds of people like today). However, those who lived the eighties as a teenager, will not remember an Italian who has invented a game, and here there is an interesting story.
In Italy at the dawn of video games and the first home computers (with the war between Commodore 64 and Spectrum, above all) the games were bought on newsstands, attached to a magazine, and were all copied. This is why I turned to Carlo Santagostino to ask for clarification: IT engineer, historian of video games and computers, founder of cyber archeology (splendid Yotutube channel), in those early eighties he was a prodigy boy: we were peers, and in the computer magazines I read, he already wrote to us at ten years. The England explains to me: there was no copyright on the games, so on the newsstand you bought the magazine with the cassette full of copied video games (for those who were too young: the video games loaded from normal musicsette, with a normal recorder, apart from the Commodore 64 that had his one of his).
Small detail: among the video games copied from abroad, you could also send your game, which was inserted on the list of pirated games to be loaded. The magazines were Program, Special Program, Games, Playgames (all published by Sipe), and this situation lasted from 1983 until 1992, when they made a law, finally.
I remember Jeff Miner (one who could be the protagonist of an episode of Black Mirror) and his games, including Attack of the Mutant Camels, from 1983. Carlo says to me: “There would be many to name. Jeff Miner began by making a clone of Centipede for the ZX81 but he published it by producing a box, which went to the shops, and founding the Lamasoft. He became his work. It would also become mine, but in Italy it was impossible, so I became a editor who reviewed games instead of planning games ». In essence, the only form of distribution that an Italian boy had as minter in Italy was to send his game to Arcadia Edizioni, for Load and Run magazine, where as an Italian rule you found both video games copied and sent by readers. “Two published me,” says Carlo, “with the first I gave myself two hundred and fifty thousand lire, with the second three hundred”, and ended up there.
One thing intrigues me: but in other countries? «The problem was the Italian jurisdiction, our right: we are Civil Law, the Anglo -Saxons Common Law. In the Common Law also in the absence of a specific law when it shows that a company has copied the games it is recognized. Therefore, in the gray plane of a legislative absence, Italian entrepreneurship awake, albeit immoral, has exploited the hole to earn us ». But in other countries, non -Anglo -Saxon ones? “They ran first to make a law, even Spain and Portugal.” Carlo also tells me something I had never thought about: the game rooms. Where we went to play Pac Man, Donkey Kong, I believed at least those were original. With cabbage. «In the eighties we never played an original game in Italy. Do you remember the cabines? All the same. They were ready card ».
Moral of the fairy tale or fairy tale of morality that was not there: while today an episode of Black Mirror makes us reflect on the sentient digital creatures and codes written in solitude in front of a computer, we Italians are left with
Remember that gracious sound of the cassette recorder and accept that while the others created universes, we copied them, we exploited who created them, and we bought them from a trusted newsstand as if nothing had happened.