Simulmondo

» see simul.it as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

A monthly comic book with two floppy disks bagged into it, on the rack at the newsstand next to the actual comics, for fifteen thousand lire. That was an Italian arrangement and it stayed Italian. It depended on a country where the edicola is a real institution and where Dylan Dog and Tex Willer shipped on a fixed monthly schedule that people planned around, and none of that transplants.

Simulmondo was founded in Bologna in 1988 by Francesco Carlà, who came to it from music journalism and had been writing a games column called Play World for MCmicrocomputer. In 1987 he ran an ad in his own column looking for Italians who wanted to turn this into a profession, and by his account hundreds answered from a scene that until then had been amateur programmers and pirates. The first office was his apartment on via Col di Lana. His business partner Riccardo Arioti left in May 1989 to found a rival, after which Carlà was the sole administrator for the rest of the company's life.

It grew fast. The first game was Bocce on the Commodore 64, written entirely by Ivan Venturi, and the early catalog ran to sports and management, Simulgolf in 1988 and F.1 Manager in 1989, with Italy '90 Soccer arriving alongside them from the Dardari brothers. By 1991 there were around twenty people on staff and more than a hundred freelancers attached, which as far as anyone at the time could tell made Simulmondo the largest employer in Italian software. The administrative offices had to move down a floor to leave room for developers. Ex-staff describe 1990 to 1992 as the golden years without much disagreement.

Carlà wanted an Italian video game the way there was an Italian cinema, something with a national character that traveled on that character. He also had to satisfy players who were buying imported product and comparing. The company was very good at getting press, sometimes too good: design ideas were regularly written up in magazines as nearly finished games that then arrived years later or never.

~ the dossier ~

~ games at the newsstand ~

In 1993 Simulmondo started publishing games as periodicals. Monthly fascicles with a double floppy for Amiga and MS-DOS, sold through the newsstand distribution network rather than through computer shops, at a fraction of a boxed game's price. The licenses were the point. Dylan Dog and Tex Willer came from Sergio Bonelli Editore, the biggest comics publisher in the country, with Diabolik from Astorina and Spider-Man from Marvel alongside them. Carlà added two of his own, Simulman and a thirty-episode series called Time Runners done with Fabbri that also went out in Spain, the UK, Germany, Portugal and Brazil.

For a while Simulmondo held most of a market it had invented from nothing. Then the same audience got bored, because a monthly deadline on a comic license does not leave room for a game to be different from the last one. The company could not get back into boxed retail afterward.

Ex-employees are close to unanimous on what the newsstand line cost internally. Everyone was moved onto it and the work was repetitive and low-profile. The periodical deadlines meant overtime that was never paid extra. Ivan Venturi left in 1993 and most of the development passed to Riccardo Cangini, who left himself in 1996.

~ the funny part ~

simul.it is still serving, and what answers is the actual site rather than an archive of it. HTML 3 with a tiled background GIF, a column of centered button images, a little animated LED divider between each one, and a link captioned NEW: SOCCER CHAMP that points at a game released in 1998. Every image on it still loads. The subpages still load. The footer gives the Bologna street address and a fax number.

One of those subpages is the most interesting thing on the whole domain. Simulmondo designed interactive games for Solletico, a children's program on RAI UNO, and the page describes them as playable from home with the keys of your telephone. CalcioMio put eight children in a soccer match, each one connected from their own house. BasketMio did two on two. This is the same trick as Hugo, running on Italian state television at roughly the same time, from a company that is otherwise remembered for floppy disks.

~ the wind-down ~

From 1994 the company moved toward CD-ROM. In 1995 it produced Little Computer People, a magazine published entirely on CD-ROM carrying demos and reviews, which Carlà claimed was the first of its kind, and in 1996 the Futurshow disc. From at least that year the Simulmondo trademark was licensed out to a company called Multi s.r.l., which is the state the surviving website is frozen in.

The last commercial game was Soccer Champ in 1998, about the career of a single footballer. The company ceased activity in 1999, eleven years after an ad in a magazine column pulled a national industry out of a hobby.

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