Dynabyte, Nippon Safes and the Italian Adventure Game Years: An Interview with Massimo Magnasciutti

Hi Massimo, first of all I have to say I am proud that my city, Genoa, gave birth to a software house as important as Dynabyte was. Would you like to tell us how it all began?

I have always been a passionate video game player, even before video games really existed! Or rather, back when “video games” were electromechanical rather than electronic, just to make clear the geological era I belong to, even before Atari’s PONG, so to speak.

When the first home computers appeared in the early 1980s, the ZX-81, C64 and Apple II, it was obviously love at first sight. I was into graphics and drawing, using traditional techniques, and I was also into computers. After seeing the first Tron at the cinema, I became completely obsessed with computer graphics and convinced my parents to buy a Macintosh in 1985, supposedly to do the bookkeeping for my mother’s shop at home. Poor woman ❤️ it would have cost her less to hire a legion of accountants!

Somehow I came into contact with NEWTRONIC, Roberto Marino’s company based in Sampierdarena. I honestly do not even remember whose idea it was to start a company to develop video games for Amiga, but together with Roberto, Paolo Costabel as programmer, Roberto Sagoleo as programmer, Alessandro Tento as graphic artist and Piero Gala as financier, I suppose, who knows, we did it. E-motion Software was born to develop Crimetown Depths, for which I handled graphics and game design.

Crimetown Depths, a 1988 E-motion Software project with graphics and game design by Massimo Magnasciutti.

Nippon Safes Inc. was recently declared freeware. It was your first game, and what a game! What can you tell us about it?

Are you familiar with the biblical concept of GREAT TRIBULATION? Well, we at Dynabyte have more than paid our dues. It was endless suffering, although it was also mixed with huge enthusiasm and a real desire to break through. The idea was there, the game was there, the graphics were there. Unfortunately, everything else was missing.

I do not blame everything on disastrous management. On the contrary, Bruno Boz worked incredibly hard, but it was a strange period for the games market. The garage band phase was already over, that time when three tough guys could develop a game for Spectrum or C64 and become millionaires. Developing any kind of game was becoming a serious undertaking, and getting noticed was becoming even harder.

The video game business was increasingly turning into what it is today: A CONSOLIDATED INDUSTRY, where if you are not already inside their circle, they barely even look at you.

The game’s distribution was truly disastrous. The main contractor suddenly vanished, leaving us broke, exposed and adrift. No money, huge amounts of work, sleepless nights and in the end everyone arguing before walking out and slamming the door.

I stepped away just after Late Nite Sexy TV Show. The others carried on, but under the same financial instability that prevents people from working calmly and producing impeccably professional results, which publishers were already starting to demand even then.

My memory of those days is positive, but mostly because it is the memory of when I was 30, had lots of hair and plenty of enthusiasm, instead of being almost 60, balding and carrying that general bitterness toward life that gives you the “they never understood me” syndrome.

I have to admit, though, that hearing there are still people who remember our games eases a lot of that bitterness.

Thank you to all of you who still find our very hard work from those “formidable” years worthy of interest, even if at times it feels a bit like being Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard.

What programs did you use to make it?

Graphically speaking, let me correct you: which program, singular! DELUXE PAINT, obviously. THE program for making graphics on Amiga. I still use it today, in its PC version through DOSBox, when I need to make icons or pixel graphics. It is simply perfect and still extremely useful today, a true software masterpiece.

Deluxe Paint, the reference software for Amiga graphics and a central tool in the work on Nippon Safes Inc.

The game’s graphics were entirely your work. Looking at them today, they still feel very clean. The cartoon style and the artistic choice behind some screens remind me a lot of those 3D books my children love so much. Was there any idea you would have liked to include, or any characters that did not make it into the final game?

I remember that several locations and characters were cut from the final game, even though they were supposed to be part of the game design. They were removed for time reasons. But instead I will give you a little gem that not many people know about the characters: in Dino Fagioli’s story branch, the “would-be suicide” Dino meets at the top of the skyscraper was inspired by Christian Cantamessa, the game designer of Steve on the Crime Wave, the demo/prequel that would eventually lead to Nippon Safes.

At the time he was really just a kid and he was taken off the project because things were not moving forward. So Costabel and I took over the game design of what would become Nippon Safes Inc.

To be honest, Christian should thank us, because after the collapse with Nippon, somehow, I do not know through which path, he was hired by Rockstar Games. A few years later I found him again as one of the game design leads on Red Dead Redemption! He probably had the talent, but he was too young and inexperienced to personally manage a project that involved other people.

Being taken off Nippon turned out very well for him, I would say!

Which character do you feel most attached to?

I HAVE ALWAYS LOVED Donna Fatale. Full stop.

Searching online, unfortunately, there is very little information and very few curiosities. Do you still have drafts of the game or unpublished drawings?

I am pretty sure I do, but they are archived somewhere and I do not know where. You have made me want to look for them. I used to doodle constantly. As soon as I find them, I will send you copies!

As Dynabyte you made six games in total. Curiously, you began with the already mentioned Nippon Safes Inc. and closed with its sequel, The Big Red Adventure, published under the Core Design label. What happened after that?

I should clarify that with Dynabyte I only worked on the first Nippon and Late Nite Sexy TV Show as game designer and graphic artist. Later I only did the backgrounds for Tube Warriors. I also gave the initial idea for the plot of The Big Red Adventure, with the notion of parachuting the three amigos into a completely secularised Russia moving from communism to consumerism, but that was it. I am still owed money for unpaid wages, after working 20 hours out of 24 during the final forced-march closing stages.

Working in those conditions, on something we had put our hearts into, was A NIGHTMARE.

What are you doing now? And what about the rest of the team? Are you still in touch?

I am no longer in touch with the former Dynabyte dynamiters, forgive the pun. I know Costabel was in the United States, but after a couple of attempts to contact him again, and seeing the lack of interest, I understood the meaning of that sign that goes around Facebook: “If we have not spoken for 15 years, there is probably a reason.”

As for my post-Dynabyte journey, after leaving Dynabyte I did a lot of things, luckily always staying in my chosen field: graphics and software.

I will spare you the full CV and the list of works, so as not to bore our audience, but I did design and graphics for many multimedia CD-ROM titles with Giunti Multimedia and DVD projects with LogosTV. Nice things, but with little “soul”, made mostly to make a living. I also learned to make software using the legendary Macromedia Director, a sort of Unreal Engine ante litteram, with which I developed complete projects including design, software, graphics and sound.

On the video game side, I worked on small projects with Milestone, Trecision and a few other publishers for the small early mobile games of that first era.

I am very proud, instead, of the 2004 to 2006 period, when I was making maps for Soldier of Fortune II. As a one-man band, I made two maps that still echo with glory on retro FPS servers today:

Prisoner in Portmeirion, a gigantic map that recreates the location from The Prisoner, that wonderfully vintage and very cult old TV series, and Zena on my Mind, a fictionalised version of Genoa’s historic centre, from Piazza De Ferrari to Sottoripa, turned into a SOF2 mod.

Two huge projects for one man alone. They took me hundreds of hours of work, but they gave me enormous satisfaction. I did everything myself, so the burdens and the honours are all mine. Both public and critics were enthusiastic!

Those maps were downloaded by several tens of thousands of SOF2 fans, and they are still around!

Later, among other things, I also made a board game that is an acidic parody of the hunt for electoral consensus: SLOGAN - caccia al consenso, which never went beyond the pre-production prototype stage.

And now we come to the present. For a few years now I have regained the desire to develop games in total autonomy and freedom, and I threw myself into learning Unreal Engine 4. I have developed several prototypes with it, mostly to properly learn the tool, which is enormously complex even though it is still accessible to someone who is not a “real” programmer.

With this development environment I have put together a few projects in an advanced prototype state, and some of them might eventually see the light on Steam. At the moment the largest one is on stand-by: a bizarre “adventure on wheels” called DRUGSTERS - Go for Heaven 11. In production, instead, I have VeGoal, an edutainment project through which I continue my animal rights and vegan battles for a better world.

For these two titles, in addition to game design, UE4 Blueprint software, 2D and 3D graphics, sounds and all the messy bits, I also composed the soundtrack. In my spare time, for a few years now, I have enjoyed making music. I call it “sofa music”, because I compose these tracks on the sofa with my iPad, using Beathawk or similar apps.

Since the Drugsters soundtrack was finished and ready, I have already released it as a preview of the incoming game. The same goes for manYmal, my album of militant animal rights and vegan tracks, which makes people who eat animals very angry! Sorry, folks, but I am staying the course when it comes to what I believe in!

Right now I am working on VeGoal - Save the Planet, Save the Animals, Save Yourself, a wave-based video game that is part of my awareness project for a better world. If everything goes well, it should be available for download in autumn, for vegans and enemies of vegans alike, so everyone is happy!

Are you still a gamer? If so, what are you playing, and what is your favourite video game of all time?

Of course I am! I will die with a joystick in my hand. On PC, I still occasionally enjoy playing Soldier of Fortune online, mostly as a nostalgia operation.

As an Xbox guy since 2007, I started with Dead Rising and the various Call of Duty and Forza Motorsport games, and I have never stopped. Even today I still get excited by the BioShock, BioShock 2 and Infinite saga, which I consider an absolute masterpiece, the most beautiful artistic video game ever. Every now and then I like to start again from the beginning and replay it. I must have finished and replayed it 30 times, and every time I discover something new.

The disc permanently sitting in my console right now is Gears of War 5, another multiplayer gaming masterpiece. I never get enough of it!

I will give you the link to my TrueAchievements profile, if you want to have a look.

In some hidden corner of the house, do you still keep an Amiga like all of us?

Unfortunately not. My Amiga 500 was on loan for use and stayed at Dynabyte.

I still have my faithful fatMac512 from 1985, though. I keep it like a relic in a controlled-atmosphere display case.