In the early 90’s, quite a few games were mentioned for UK release by Italian company “Idea”, and quite a few did actually make it over here… Apart from Sturmtruppen.
Sturmtruppen was described as a sort of Midnight Resistance style game, with plenty of jumping and shooting action. The game was mentioned in Commodore Format very briefly, but never seen again. It is thanks to Mr Fox that we are able to see a first glimpse of what the game looked like.
Sturmtruppen was planned for both the Amiga (later released) and the C64, and it was based on a comic strip lampooning the military life during a war which might or might not be the WWII – it was mostly an excuse to make fun of the idiocy of war and military-types in general. The strip ran for about 20 years with declining fortunes, and was periodically revived by the agency which owns the right to the original strips and its sequels, done by in-house artists.
The author of the strip, Franco “Bonvi” Bonvicini was one of the most famous Italian comicbook authors during the Seventies, close friend of Hugo Pratt of Corto Maltese fame. He was at the game preview where Fabio Rossi was present, in his customary stuporous state, and the whole affair was quite disconcerting to everyone involved – but Fabio still prizes a sketch of himself as a Sturmtruppen that was drawn perfectly.
The game itself was a side scroller mixing the usual elements of that type of games with “Spy vs. Spy” wacky traps and gadgets. According to Fabio, the first two levels were completed, but the game was never completed. The reasons being a split between Antonio Farina (owner of Idea and now CEO of Milestone) and the management of Leader Distribuzione (the publishing and distributing company of which Idea was actually a branch).
Fabio recalls – “The game programmer probably completed the game on his own and used it to test a new technique of colour interpolation (basically, he flashed very rapidly single pixels with different colours in order to give the effect of an intermediate hue, extending the perceived palette). Can’t remember his name at all, but he was the very nice guy behind a couple of other C64 games, including a heavily Antiriad-inspired horizontal scroller which got quite good reviews everywhere.”
The screenshots we had were not really clear, but they seemed to resemble partial level maps for some of the game’s levels. There was no signs of a main character or anything like that. Maybe there were other screenshots in other magazines in various places?… Well, there was! Thanks to Luca/Fire, we can confirm that there were some much later screenshots and now we have added these!… these include some action going on and much more of the game panels.
In Zzap Italia, there was a feature on the development of the game which can be found in the gallery.
Originally it was believed that Paolo Galimberti was the coder of the game, but he was just the graphic artist and in fact – Roberto La Ragione was the developer of the game. The game was one of his first efforts on the C64 and was picked up after the choice between this game and Lupo Alberto (Roberto was a fan of Bonvi’s work).
Work was initially very tough, but after 6-8 months – the game was very much starting to take shape. The graphics went through several cycles until they started to feel right – and right they did look. Apparently there were also some very cool colour cycling effects being used to really try and make the game stand out. Sonically the game was solid too – with a good set of tunes produced and completed.
Roberto was unsure to why the game was never actually released – the company just cancelled the game for no given reason. Roberto suggested that the game was practically finished – so it is very odd. It is believed there was a bust up between Farina and Leader, which resulted in the cancellation – but this has not yet been confirmed.
This information was found thanks to the guys at Ready64, who interviewed Roberto. When asked if he still had anything of the game, unfortunately it was bad news. He got rid of all his C64 gear after it broke many years ago. The only chance now may be with the graphic artist – but it is unfortunately looking bleak as Paolo is proving tough to track down.
Hopefully some day we may see something of this game, other than forever looking at the scans and thinking what might have been.
