Before you say it – yes, this was an April Fools and not a real game. However, we have of course featured Mindsmear in the past, so it is only right that we feature Zzap Italia’s 1989 April Fools.
The idea to do the April Fool was by occasional magazine contributor Giovanni Papandrea, and was implemented by Fabio Rossi and the Zzap Italia team. It’s possible that Fabio was behind the screens, but this is to be confirmed.
What is quite nice is that the team went to the effort of creating a 3 page “review”, complete with 3 mocked up screens. It was fairly convincing, and had a great 98% score at the end. At some point we’ll try and add an English translation, but you can for now find the original scans below.
It’s felt that it all became a bit too obvious with the mention of dozens of disks and big-name screenwriters listed – but it did the trick and was one of the best April fools that the mag would run. Fabio reveals that it worked rather well, and even had Lucasfilm Games get in touch with them with a very angry tone to try and track down who had “leaked” the material. Fabio recalls that several contributors were asked to come up with their own takes on the game, with personal review boxes.
We were intrigued to see if anything of the mock up screens had survived, but Fabio confirmed that the material was in the publisher archives and was likely thrown away many years ago. A shame, but a fun April Fool from back in the day.
Contributions: Fabio Rossi
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I covered another (belated) April Fools joke in Micro Mart – this demo -> https://csdb.dk/release/?id=90364 hinted at a sequel or something, which I covered in Micro Mart. What was meant was an upcoming EasyFlash release. Oh, how I was fooled.
Ah I remember seeing this – very well done too!