Doriano Benaglia probably isn't a name many video game fans are aware of, but he is a historic figure in the Italian games industry for his role in founding Lindasoft, one of the first Italian software houses.
At Lindasoft, Benaglia was responsible for working on many different titles, including the unlicensed Beatles' adventure I Beatles e Il Papiro Della Pace and a string of other games for Atari 8-bit computers. But sadly, he hasn't given many interviews over the years and his whereabouts are currently unknown. As such, it's been mostly left to random individuals online to piece together his legacy in games and archive his surviving work.
Recently on Twitter, the Italian video game historian (and sometimes Time Extension contributor) Damiano Gerli alerted us to the appearance of another one of Benaglia's games online, from before he ever founded Lindasoft.
The game, which is called 2030 Radio Killers, appears to be a collaboration between the artist Benaglia and another individual named Daniele Guarino who handled the code. It is an Italian graphic adventure controlled using a parser, and according to Gerli, takes place in a future New York where the player had to solve a conspiracy against a bunch of radio networks.
According to the website Atarimania, who was responsible for dumping the game with the help of a user named Rocky007, a mysterious publisher named Lago Sistemi released it for Atari 400/600 computers back in 1986. If you want to take a look at the game for yourself, you can download it from the Atarimania website. Though, as should be apparent by now, it's in Italian, so bear that in mind.
Are you going to give the game a try? Comment and let us know!
[source atarimania.com, via twitter.com]
Comments 3
Well, being Italian is strange to me to hear the name Lindasoft for the first time here. Now I have something more to explore, so thank you!
@AlessandroZPE It's a fascinating company. I first heard about them when exploring early (unlicensed) Beatles games for home computers.
I tried to track down Benaglia for an interview, and know the journalist Damiano Gerli has too, but sadly he just doesn't seem to be active or reachable through social media. I did speak to some of his colleagues though, who told me one or two things about the company like that it was named after Benaglia's daughter Linda.
@JackGYarwood Thanks for answering!
I read something about this company and I guess I now know why it was so unknown to me: I don't know anything about Atari microcomputers.
I thought Lindasoft was related to the tons of companies that operated here in Italy during the Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum 'official bootlegs' days (man, I love that moment) but apparently they didn't make anything for those computers.
And yet, this story about a company named after someone's daughter is familiar.
I have to dig out something more about this (and check these games, also).
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