Outside, 1971 slowly unfolds. At the end of the year, Italy will have a new President of the Republic, Giovanni Leone. Everywhere, from public housing to the damask living rooms of the villas belonging to the bourgeois elite, the clear voice of Lucio Dalla enters. Mina is the ruler of black and white television. And the country of the economic miracle begins to buckle under the weight of the austerity to come. We are starting to feel modern, but not too modern, all things considered: the washing machine drums rotate incessantly in the dining rooms, the Fiat 127 colonizes the streets, but the future – the coveted, electronic, digital one – is still a silicon dream. Yet, right then, in that gap suspended between the past and tomorrow, an entertainer invents without knowing it the first Italian television video game. Is called Pippo Baudo and is the emperor of the cathode ray tube. And the game, prophetic in both name and spirit, is titled The Golden Arrow.
Baudo is fresh from the overwhelming success of Seven voicesthe program that launched artists such as Orietta Berti and Massimo Ranieri into the television firmament. He is young, ambitious, and above all curious. Rai gives him trust and space, and he decides to bring to the screen an experiment that today we could define as a gaming show proto-format. They are on stage a competitor, a crossbow and a television screen. Digital technology is still a mirage, the computer has not appeared, but an idea imposes itself: playing through images.
The mechanism is as simple as it is revolutionary. The competitor must aim at a target visible only on the monitor. The cameraman – blindfolded – moves following the instructions of the competitor, who guides him verbally: “further to the right”, “forward”, “stop”, “now shoot”. The images scroll on the screen, the time ticks, the tension rises. “On the monitor you can see the images of the target and the cameraman – explains Baudo –. The cameraman is blindfolded and will be directed by you. The time is kept on the telescreen”. It is, in all respects, a video game before its time: analogue, theatrical, scenographic, but founded on the same principle that will govern the Pac-Man and Super Mario universe decades later: the interaction between player and screen.
In that Italy still in black and white, with the remote control which is a luxury and the word “pixel” which has not yet been born, The Golden Arrow anticipates a world. In this context the idea of a medium that reacts, of a television no longer just to watchbut to be maneuvered. A narrative machine that enchants, because competitors and spectators begin to feel like real protagonists, called to interact, to decide, to make mistakes. Baudo, who knows every nook and cranny of TV, understands that participation is the true heart of the show. And it does so, almost paradoxically, through a game of arrows, targets and voice commands.
Rai, without realizing it, writes like this a page on the archeology of interactivity. Years before Tennis for Twobefore Pongbefore the word “video game” makes its way into dictionaries, the Italian public service is staging an analogue version of what will become the entertainment industry of the future. A game where the action is broadcast live, and reality – real, physical, televised reality – disguises itself as a simulation.
The Golden Arrow hits the target for that freshness, for the willingness to experiment without fear. In an Italy that still looks with distrust at “intelligent machines”, Pippo Baudo – the host, the showman, the face of variety shows – shows off a format that contains the flavor of a small miracle: a game in which high technology is useless, because imagination is enough to make a world materialize.
That arrow shot in 1971 cuts and penetrates,
because it is the synthesis of a TV as a mirror of evolving times, curiosity as an engine of progress, and a simple but brilliant idea which, before computers and consoles, he had already guessed everything.