A great little finding which has come to GTW thanks to Roberto Nicoletti.
Steel Robot was produced by Italian Simone Balestra who programmed Clik Clak for Idea Software in the early 90’s. It was the result of a conversation with Simone by Roberto, that the game was uncovered when Simone sent Roberto a copy of his unreleased game.
Simone had the following to say:
“I’ve finally found one of my first games: ‘Steel Robot’… Good thing ten years ago I gave all my floppy disks to Ivan Del Duca to have them dumped. Looking back at it a weird feeling got me! Honestly I forgot how difficult it was. I actually thought it was way easier than this… now that I played it again I remember, while coding it, I specifically included some dirty tricks to make it more difficult, such as loosing some energy if a minimum score is not reached”
The game itself is best described as a kind of Transbot clone (Whom Master System fans will be well aware of) or seems to be inspired by it. It’s not quite as polished as Transbot, but its a nice early indication of Simone’s coding talent with some very nice touches in the game.
It’s a great little finding, and i’m glad its been preserved. You’ll be happy to know that it is infact a full game and has never been seen before. A big thanks to Roberto for his hard work uncovering the game. Now you can enjoy it too for the first time as Simone had originally intended.
Now we just need to find out why this game never got released in the first place and close the case.
Certainly worth a look!… Another game saved!…
Contributions: Roberto Nicoletti
