Games for Commodore 64

I wrote videogames for the Commodore 64 between 1990 and 1992, while I was studying Engineering. I had a collaboration with Simulmondo, a sofware house based in Bologna, for writing the code of some games. The game design and the graphics were usually done by Ivan Venturi, the sound and music by Stefano Palmonari.

All C64 games were written in Assembly language, the only option for getting a good performance. It was a constant fight against the limitations of CPU and memory. The last game I wrote (A.C. Milan) was for MS-DOS and written in C ... a different world !

The Ready64 website features an interview (in Italian) and some documents about my work at that time.

You may notice that most of my games deal with soccer. This is because most people in Italy like it. Well, I hate soccer ! But writing a soccer game is not the same as playing it or watching it on TV.

My Videogames

•  I Play: 3D Soccer

My first commercial videogame. As the title says, it was a soccer game with a 3D display, showing the point of view of the player. It was quite challenging to handle such 3D graphics at that time, given the limited processing resources of the Commodore 64 (e.g. an 8-bit CPU with no support for divisions and multiplications). The game had a two-player mode too, where two distinct 3D viewports were rendered while still keeping a high frame rate and smooth action. This game got good reviews on various European magazines.

•  I Play: Football Champ

An extension of 3D Soccer, with a new section for planning the team strategy and a more complex simulation of a championship. Most of the core game code was reused from 3D Soccer.

•  Dylan Dog: Gli Uccisori

Based on the Dylan Dog comic books, famous in Italy. Dylan Dog is a nightmare investigator, often dealing with monsters and horror stories. The game is platform-based and our hero has to find clues in a dark house for finding his way out, like unlocking secret doors. It also has to kill the "Murderers" (Gli Uccisori) who are blocking his way, using various weapons he'll find around the house. The game is not so complex from a technical point of view, especially because of the simple graphics compared to the previous soccer games.

•  A.C. Milan Football Simulator

This is my only game for PC / MS-DOS. It is a management game, were you act as a team manager and trainer by buying and selling players, defining strategies and leading the team during the matches. It contains a simulation of the matches, were you don't control a player directly, but you just define a high-level strategy. It was supposed to be the first game of a series, dedicated to different football teams. The game was designed to read most of its data from a configuration file, so it would have been possible to publish games with different graphics and text without even recompiling. Unluckily this game was not very successful and no other releases were done, apart from A.C. Milan. For this game Simulmondo used a different distribution model, by selling it in newsstands.

3D Soccer Trivia

It's amazing that such a nice game was based on blueprints like these:

	Memory Map
	Font Map

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