Throughout 2000 years of human history, ever since mankind understood how to package and sell a work of art, a single struggle has resisted, immortal,

Once we were giants: the history of Simulmondo – Italy’s first software house – Part I

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2021-06-13 16:30:08

Throughout 2000 years of human history, ever since mankind understood how to package and sell a work of art, a single struggle has resisted, immortal, rearing its ugly head time and time again: the artist against the system. It’s a timeless tale, used in books and screenplays: the desperate toil of a striving artist to make his work known, while the world’s business owners and managers are bent on castrating it only to profit off the poor soul’s internal struggles. It happened to Michelangelo, it happened to Pollock and it happened with Simulmondo.

Simulmondo was the first Italian software house that managed to develop and self publish its own games, anticipating several contemporary marketing ideas; among them, episodic games. But, chances are, dear reader, you are not familiar at all with that name. Why were those amazing ideas not enough to keep the company afloat? To find out what happened, I’ve reached out to several people involved with Simulmondo and found out that, even though 20 years have passed, some cuts do not ever really heal and the scars are never forgotten.

Gathering up information about Simulmondo, especially in 2021, proved one of the biggest challenges of my career. Throughout the dozens of interviews that can be easily found on the internet, the people involved with the software house have ended up saying a lot of different things, from numbers and figures to talking about sweet memories of their time in the software house which, when it was my turn to interview them, were recounted differently.

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