A preview of an up and coming game by Italian giants Simulmondo in 1992. Not much is known about the game, apart from the main character was based from an old Italian comic, called Diabolik. The character was a thief and an assassin, the “Armakuni’s” dress is his usual look for when he’s in action. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki /Diabolik
The preview itself just consists of a series of intro screens, followed by release details for other machines. So the game was due for the PC and Amiga too and actually got released. The game was actually released on the Amiga in a large series of games, all following the same style. http://hol.abime.net/343
The game basically was a kind of Metal Warrior/Saboteur style of game, and it seems that the C64 would have been host to a series of games. However it is likely that Simulmondo abandoned the C64 in favour of the 16-bit platforms, and hence this game was lost. Diabolik and its games appeared in around 1993 time.
More information is required on this game, including who was working on it. Quite possibly the same people who did Dylan Dog (Certainly the style was not too far off!) In 2010, Roberto Nicoletti spoke with Ivan Venturi and Nicola Ferioli and had the following to say:
“I’ve also talked about Diabolik to Ivan Venturi and Nicola Ferioli and at first time they did not remembered at all they have worked on it. Then I showed to Ivan the screenshot of the preview and he starts to remember a bit. Nicola Ferioli did not remember Diabolik also, but when at home he found through some old diskette the development floppy, with sources included.
I guess the case could be closed: they worked on it a couple of afternoon about 20 years ago but were too busy with other project to keep tracks in their memory. “
So within the archive we now have a disk copy of the intro containing some source code, but this is just for the intro sequence and no game. It seems the C64 intro was started, but no game was ever created with just an Amiga/PC version being produced in 1993.
Gaz Spence found that the trailer/demo was actually released by Simulmondo themselves as a bonus extra in Basket Play-Off. In the demo, it just says “Coming soon on your Amiga, PC VGA 256 colors”. So it seems that that point a C64 development was off the cards. Perhaps it was never on the cards at all, and the intro demo that leaked was just produced as an advert for the game on other platforms.
Sadly it looks like a case closed on this one.
Contributions: Andy/AEG, Roberto Nicoletti, Gaz Spence, Non sono Mandrake, Vaz
Supporting content
Available downloads
- Preview_Diabolik.zip (zip)
Gallery
Update history
- 30/10/24 – Fix to the company name
- 10/09/24 – Explanation about the demo only containing reference to PC + Amiga game.
- 24/07/22 – Confirmation of where the demo came from and got released.
Hey Frank, just a quick heads-up: it’s Simulmondo, not Simulmundo :)
Thanks Vaz! Not sure how I had missed that for so long! All fixed.
The demo for Diabolik was contained as a extra in the release of Basket Play-Off. See https://retrocollector.org/index.php?page=1&system=1&media=123456789AYZ&publisher=327&title=&box=-1®ion=-1&type=0123Z&release=16259#113002. It doesn’t tell us much more about the Diabolik, other than the demo was released directly by Simulmundo.
Ah that’s brilliant, thanks Gaz! Will update the page to say this.
Note that the Diabolik demo in Basket Play-Off says “Coming soon on your Amiga, PC VGA 256 colors” (and it did). It is visible in one of the screenshots at the retrocollector.org link above. The demo was shown in a C64 game, but it wasn’t meant to be a demo of a C64 game.
Great spot! Thank you!
I think that essentially confirms that a C64 version was likely never in serious production or consideration. The Intro purely produced as an advert for the Amiga/PC game – seems a little cruel, but there you go! ;)