Whilst at Zzap Live in May 2025, we met up with the legendary Tim Gilberts, who set up Gilsoft at the age of just 17. Tim flagged up that he had a very rare Italian bootleg of The Quill which didn’t seem to be out there and preserved called “Adventure Writer (Creator 2)”. Unfortunately it wouldn’t load for him.
An hour or so later, Tim excitedly informed us that the adventure creator had suddenly loaded for him – but he had no mechanism of backing up. We attempted to back up using a 1541-Ultimate 2 from Andy Spencer (Retro Computer Museum) – but it wasn’t having it. So Tim very kindly agreed to loan the tape and manual to Games That Weren’t to preserve.
Thankfully after a few attempts, we managed to get both sides of the tape backed up and working and have also scanned everything in too. Here you can find the full archive, as well as an Archive.org link with the raw original scans. Tim has kindly now donated the package to the Retro Computer Museum, so it will go into their archives sometime in June 2025.
UPDATE: We’ve since learnt that it has already been preserved by Ready64, and it was part of a “Creator” series. So it wasn’t called “Creator 2”, but “Adventure Writer” (the title in the actual program is a bit misleading), hence why we didn’t spot it was already preserved ;-) . Hopefully the scans will be useful still :-)
Many thanks to Tim Gilberts for the very kind loan and also to Andy Spencer for helping see the game fully preserved and corrections and information about its preservation by Martin/Stadium64.
Downloads
Gallery
visit this link:
https://ready64.org/download/categorie.php?cat=5
great preserving this.
but just wanted to point out that this looks like “just” a bootlegged italian release of this. Atleast the company behind this; Edizione Foglia bootlegged lots of different games.
visit: https://www.edicola8bit.com/
click on C=64, and scroll down to Edizione Foglia
And the manual is equal to the size of comic paper?, if that, these kind of things was sold in newspapers stands in italy, all of this is as far as I know bootlegs.
The No.2 thingy is probably an issue 2, in one of their different “brands”.
So my guess is that Creator is the “brand” of this and its Issue 2 you have preserved?
and name of “game” actually is: Scrittore di Avventure = Adventure writer
If licensed it should most likely have a mention of the original source?
Renaming release name and modified and removing credits from the originals was something they did in italy and bootlegged.
Perhaps there is an Issue 1 & 3 as well, and my guess go to that The Illustrator was renamed to something and released as Issue 3?
Thanks Martin! Ah, that’s why I missed it on the Ready64 site. I’ll update the page quickly, but also Tim has confirmed it was indeed a bootleg that he picked up in later years – hopefully the scans/backup will still be useful :)
Wow! I’d be interested in hearing more about the background of this and its release.
Was this an officially licensed translation/conversion?
There are almost 50 known Italian “Quilled” text adventures; mostly by Bonaventura di Bello. I wonder if any games were released that were made with this specific version of the tool.
Hopefully Tim can shed some more light on it, such as whether it was official or not. My guess is that it was, as he was seemingly sent a copy. It would be interesting if there was some kind of tag in the adventures to say what version had been used.