What follows is a summary of one of the biggest projects in text adventure history. It’s a project that has only just started and may take years to complete. It’s a project that could result in 69 new text adventures re-engineered from Italian games from the 1980s. Read on if you dare.
The past
In the home computer boom of the 1980s, before the days of the internet, computer magazines were the normal way of distributing computer news and information. Newsagents, book shops and computer stores had a wide range of magazines devoted to different computer systems. Those targeted at home computers were typically full of news, reviews, interviews, articles, advertisements and type-in listings for games and utilities. Every so often, there would be a type-in listing for a text adventure.
In Italy, there was an interesting phenomenon that did not occur anywhere else in the world. In April 1985, a collaboration between Arscom of Genoa and Edisoft of Milan resulted in a monthly magazine called Next Strategy that was devoted exclusively to text adventures. Each magazine included three adventures on a cover tape written in BASIC by Roberto Tabacco for the Commodore 64. A unique feature of these adventures was that each game was associated with the name of the protagonist and these were presented as a series of games over a number of issues. This began a trend that was soon emulated by several other Italian magazines.
After the first six issues of Next Strategy, Arscom split from Edisoft in February 1986 and joined with Edizioni Hobby to publish Epic 3000, while Next Strategy continued for a further four issues with adventures written by Alessandro Zanello until July 1986.
Epic 3000 continued with the adventures written by Roberto Tabacco for the Commodore 64, but they were also ported to the ZX Spectrum 48k by Bonaventura Di Bello (hereafter referred to as ‘BDB’). Epic 3000 was published monthly with seven issues from May 1986 to November 1986.
The publisher noticed the greater playability of BDB’s ports, due to the better parser, so they entrusted him with coding for the C64 as well. This resulted in Epic 3000 being replaced by Explorer, again published by Edizioni Hobby. This lasted for 12 issues from November 1986 to November 1987. Once again, there were three adventures per issue and each game was associated with the name of the protagonist. This time, all the adventures were written by BDB for the Commodore 64 using The Quill and Illustrator. These were also ported to the MSX, but The Quill wasn’t available for the MSX, so BDB adapted Enrico Colombini’s ‘Modulo BASE’ (BASIC Module, a basic template for adventure games) to interpret The Quill data. There was also planned to be an Amstrad CPC version, but this never eventuated.
Explorer was replaced by Viking Adventures in Italiano. This was published by Edizioni Hobby over 11 issues from January 1987 to December 1987. All the games were written by BDB and there were three adventures per issue written with The Quill and Illustrator for the Commodore 64, but this time, they were also ported to the ZX Spectrum.
All in all, BDB wrote 69 games for the Commodore 64, plus a subset of those for the MSX or ZX Spectrum. He also published one game for the ZX Spectrum that was published in Load ‘n’ Run, no. 37, April 1987, but this was used a couple of months later as the basis for one of the other games.
These 69 games have never been translated to English. They were written during a time when games were brutal. They were full of sudden death, guess-the-verb, tight inventory limits, mazes, unwinnable situations and moon logic. Despite that, they were very popular in Italy.
The Last 12 Months
In August 2024, Gianluca Girelli contacted BDB and asked for permission to translate his 37-year-old games to English and bring them up to date for a modern audience. BDB was thrilled to think that people were still interested in his old games and gave him permission to proceed.
Gianluca started on Kenneth Johnson: Wild West, which was one of two games in Explorer with a Western theme. He asked Garry Francis to test it and Garry found it to be a fun game. Gianluca soon worked out that Garry already had a deep knowledge of the Italian magazine games and Garry revealed that there was another Kenneth Johnson game published in Viking that made it a trilogy. Interestingly, the first and third games in the trilogy were published in Explorer, but the second was published in Viking, as the publliction dates of the magazines overlapped.
Gianluca then started on Kenneth Johnson: Tin Star (the second in the series) and ran into technical difficulties, so Garry helped him out. By this time, the two had formed an interesting partnership which developed into ‘The BDB Project’. As there were so many games to be included in the project, they kept it secret until they were sure that this was something that could be delivered.
While Gianluca was working on Wild West and Tin Star, Garry used UnQuill to extract all the Quill data from the C64 tape images, removed any unnecessary data, manually reformatted it and translated all the strings from Italian to English using Google Translate. He then copied all the 4-character vocabulary words into a Word document and painstakingly translated these to English with help from Gianluca. Once he had the translation tables, he was able to translate the vocabulary in UnQuill’s CondActs tables, draw maps in Trizbort and create an Inform 6 skeleton for each game. He also OCRed the articles and solutions from the original magazines (except for Viking no. 2, which has never been archived), painstakingly checked and corrected the typos, then translated these to English using Google Translate.
After 6 months, Garry had UnQuill data, translation tables, articles, walkthroughs, maps and Inform 6 skeletons for all 69 games. He then started on the game logic for a couple of the games and discovered that reverse engineering the UnQuill data was not an easy task.
By this time, the team had completed the Kenneth Johnson trilogy and this was entered in ParserComp 2025.
The Present
After a year into the project and the quiet release of the first three games in ParserComp 2025, we are now ready to bring The BDB Project to public attention. We are now releasing post-comp versions of the Kenneth Johnson trilogy and three new games, ranging in difficulty from easy to hard. The six games are:
- Wild West (easy)
- Tin Star (medium)
- Desperados (medium)
- Caribbean Treasure (easy)
- The Wrath of Anubis (medium)
- Unknown Dimension (hard, this was BDB’s first game)
The creative process of reverse engineering, remaking and enhancing every single game has been both frustrating and rewarding. Gianluca has kept in contact with BDB and gives him regular progress reports. BDB has been very supportive and gives us feedback, so we are very grateful for that.
We must emphasise that the new games are not just ports of the old Italian games, but adaptations of the old games for a modern audience. The aim is to:
- Translate the games to English.
- Remove all the sudden death. You can still die, but there will always be a good reason for it, you will normally be warned in advance and you can always UNDO on modern platforms.
- Remove guess-the-verb, as best as possible.
- Relax the inventory limits. There are still limits, but they are more generous than in the original games.
- Remove or simplify the mazes.
- Remove unwinnable situations.
- Remove the moon logic that was prevalent in the games of the 1980s.
The games now have a friendlier, multi-word parser, extended vocabulary, more synonyms, richer descriptions and more responses for things you may try, but aren’t necessary to solve the game. You can now examine just about everything in the game, including scenery, to get further detail or important clues. There is also a HINT command.
In many cases, there were things in the original games that made no sense, so we needed to change the story, change the map or move things around. As a consequence, there are enhancements to the original puzzles and quite often additional puzzles so that everything makes sense within the context of the game.
Despite all these changes, we have tried to preserve the spirit of the original games. This approach may not agree with everyone, but this was a carefully considered design choice that results in games that are a lot more fun to play. And isn’t that all that matters?
The games are being written in Inform 6 using the PunyInform library and will be published on an irregular basis, as time permits. Apart from all the game skeletons, we have five more games in progress and hope to deliver an average of one game per month.
We will also be releasing these games for selected retro platforms, initially Atari, BBC and Commodore 8-bit and 16-bit computers. If you’d like your favourite computer to be included, let us know, but it must have a z5 interpreter. This porting takes a lot of effort, so we will only continue to do this if there’s sufficient interest. All games are playable online anyway, and this is a far better playing experience.
The official web site for all new releases is The BDB Project at itch.io. Follow us to get notified of new games and updates.
Bonaventura, Gianluca and Garry hope you enjoy this blast from the past.
Footnote
Viking no. 11 was the last magazine published with BDB games. Work had started on issue 12, but this was never published. It turns out that a contributor had provided outlines for three games that were to be further developed and included in this issue. The notes for these games were sent to a member of the magazine’s staff, but that person was sadly killed in a motor cycle accident, so the original contributor is unknown.
The unfinished games were titled Sorsi di Terrore (Taste of Terror), New Pasqua (New Easter) and La Bottega della Morte (Death Workshop). The notes for these games were forgotten for over 35 years, then were discovered a few years ago in BDB’s dusty archives, along with the articles for the games and the editorial written for Viking no. 12.
Marco Vallarino scanned the material from the archives and sent it to us. Garry OCRed and checked the Italian text, translated it to English and drew the maps in Trizbort.
Two of the games had only a map and objects placed on the map. There were no design notes, so we had no idea what the games were about, plot or puzzles.
The third game had hand-written design notes. Gianluca translated these to English and we soon realised that there were omissions and ambiguities, the story didn’t make much sense and large chunks were missing. Nevertheless, there was enough to read between the lines.
Over a couple of weeks, Garry did a draft of the game, thrashed out lots of ideas with Gianluca and eventually came up with a story and puzzles that made for a pretty neat game. This was published as A Taste of Terror in ParserComp 2025, but as this was not designed or written by BDB, it falls outside the scope of The BDB Project.
