Many moons ago, when I was gainfully employed on Zzap!'s letters
pages rather than the numbing series of demeaning half-jobs that now pass
through my mundane existence, news reached the Towers of a European version of
our humble rag. At first we thought it was idle speculation. Then we glimpsed
the evidence—a picture of Julian Rignall speaking in a tongue alien to the
Ludlovian pub-crawling crowd... So it was true: Zzap! had an Italian cousin!
(You can read more about it at the splendidly-designed Progetto Zzap! Italia.) In the
years that followed I have often wondered what happened to our Mediterranean
friends, though never to the point where I actually did anything about it.
However, I was recently contacted in my bedsit on Clee Hill by none other than
Paolo Besser—Zzap!'s last
Italian editor, the man responsible for overseeing its transition from a
magazine to a website in the 1990s, and now the translator of Zzap!107. Despite my reputation for acerbity and poor personal
hygiene, he kindly agreed to an
interview...

LM: Tell me the story behind Zzap!
Italia...
It was based in Milan, and started life as a translation of Zzap! with
added Italian content. We acquired the rights for the magazine; then, when
Newsfield went out of business, we went our own way with exclusively Italian
material. The first issue was published in May 1986: the magazine normally had
84 pages, but there were months with more, especially near Christmas. The last
"official" issue came out in December 1992; after that it was reduced to a
16-page insert in the best-selling magazine The Games Machine. (This started, like Zzap!, as a
translation: it first came out in September 1988 and is still going strong). The
insert took the mag through to December 1993, at which point we decided that
dwindling interest in the Commodore 64 could no longer sustain it... However,
three years later, with the internet market growing, we had the idea to create
an e-magazine about PC and Amiga games. We called it Zzap!, and used an html
version of the original design. This website lasted until January 1999, when it
was closed due to a change in the publisher's editorial policy.

LM: What was your role?
I started as a journalist writing "BovaByte's corner", a funny
parody of games magazines. The articles proved popular with the Zzap! staff, and
I was invited to join the crew, becoming a fully-fledged reviewer in May 1990.
In November 1992 I was elected editor-in-chief by the publisher, but my role was
merely to accompany the mag to its grave two months later—its fate had already
been decided. I kept the title of editor-in-chief both for the 16-page insert in
TGM, and on the website.

LM: What were the major
differences between the UK and Italian Zzap!s?
Overall, the differences weren't huge, but perhaps the greatest was
that the Italian Zzap! covered all 8-bit computer platforms, not just the C64.
Apart from that, we made our own decisions about design, and the translation was
never literal. For example, during the Newsfield era we preserved only the game
ratings and the general substance of the comments—the rest was totally rewritten
in a humorous way. On the whole, I think our Zzap! has always been something
original.

LM: Are there any websites
devoted to the Italian Zzap!?
There was a project called "Progetto Edicola", which was set up to
collect old magazines generally; but I know of no specific collection of old
Italian issues on the web. As the Italian publisher still own the rights for our
version of Zzap!, it could be that our readers and collectors are a little shy
to scan the magazines and put them on the web—I don't know anybody involved in a
project similar to The Def
Guide to Zzap!64. The situation is different for the Italian version of
Issue 107: we coordinated the translation directly from our official webpage, TGM Online.

LM: What are your current
projects?
Apart from working for The Games
Machine, I recently organised the translation of Zzap!107 for an Italian audience. It was designed on Quark
Xpress 3.3, using the Basilisk II Mac emulator on my PC... So I created a magazine
about emulated games on an emulated Macintosh!

LM: What are your Top 5 C64
games?
Oh... I played so many, and every
one is a special memory; I tend to remember games more for the time in which I
played them than for the game itself. For example, years and years ago when I
was at school, there was a strike by the students (I don't recall why); and at
some point during that period, I and my friend Davide Corrado went to a local
computer shop and bought a copy of R-Type. We spent the rest of the morning and
afternoon playing it... Anyway, these are the games I enjoyed
most:

Bubble Bobble (coin-op and C64
conversion)
The Great Giana Sisters
Road
Runner
R-Type
Barbarian

LM: And your Top 5 non-C64
games?

Guitar Freaks (and all
Bemanis)
Black & White (PC)
Parappa the Rapper
(Playstation)
Turrican (Amiga)
Bomb Jack (coin-op)

LM: Is there anything you'd
like to add about C64 games in general?
Um... Sometimes I think I
miss them very much. But I realise I don't actually miss the games themselves,
but the things they represented for me in those years. I was a teenager, I went
to school, I fell in love for the first time... And I played them with friends,
too (and I don't even know if those friends are still alive...)

...On that wistful and slightly melancholy note,
it was mutually agreed that my body odour had forced the interview to a close. I
thanked Paolo for his time and olfactory endurance, and returned to Clee Hill
with half a dozen copies of the Italian Zzap! stashed in my briefcase. It had
been an interesting few hours, but I couldn't help wishing that we'd spoken a
decade earlier, when I still had all my own hair and was a little more sane...
LM

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