Game 166: Flash Gordon: il Rapimento di Dale (1994) - Introduction

Written by Vetinari

Welcome one and all to this new playthrough for the Adventurers’ Guild. The game that we will tackle in this series of posts is “Flash Gordon: il rapimento di Dale” (Dale’s kidnapping).

The character of Flash Gordon originated in 1934 and was created by comic book legend Alex Raymond. The idea was for the new character to compete with the similar and already established Buck Rogers adventure strip. It was a smash hit, such that Flash Gordon is regarded as one of the best illustrated and most influential American adventure comic strips; for example its success is often cited as a big influence on early superhero comics characters design.

Men in spandex suits indeed.

My own exposure to the character unfortunately comes from very much later. In fact, I only learnt of the Flash Gordon franchise through the (frankly very bad) motion picture from 1980, in particular because of the iconic theme-song "Flash" by Queen, who composed and performed the entire musical score for the movie.

The making of the film has some really interesting anecdotes: apparently Federico Fellini (!) optioned the Flash Gordon rights from producer Dino De Laurentiis, but in the end never managed to make the film. George Lucas (!!) also attempted to shoot a Flash Gordon film in the 1970s, but was unable to acquire the rights from De Laurentiis, so he decided to create “Star Wars” instead. 

Imagine what might have been.

De Laurentiis also contacted Sergio Leone (!!!) for him to direct the Flash Gordon film, but Leone declined because he believed the script was not faithful to the original comic strips.

We then come to 1994, the year when this Flash Gordon video game was published.

You might be wondering why I have been chosen to handle the demanding task of playing through this little-known game. The main reason is that I do have a very particular set of skills, skills I have acquired over a very long career, which makes me uniquely suitable to play through this game for your education and amusement.

It’s because this game is in Italian.

"Flash Gordon – Il rapimento di Dale" is a DOS game, the first issue of the series "Comic Art Games", debuting in 1994 as newsagent goods. The plot is the same as the early original comic books: “Flash Gordon and Dale Arden board Dr. Zarkov's rocket ship to reach a planet on a collision course with the Earth. Upon crash-landing on the mysterious planet, Flash and Dale face the minions of Ming the Merciless, who plans to take Dale as his bride. Flash avoids capture and must find outside help in order to enter the fortress and rescue Dale.”

From the description that I found it seems an adventure game only very loosely, since it seems that this game “has an emphasis on combat, with frequent monster encounters that can be dealt with using bare hands or a laser pistol.” However it also seems that Flash will explore various fixed two-dimensional screens and that there is an inventory for object interactions and also multiple-choice dialogue options.

The “Comic Art Games” series spawned various different products, based on different comic book characters: apart from Flash Gordon, there were games produced about Mandrake, Yellow Kid and The Ethernaut.

In the 90s the strips and stories of these characters were already published in Italy by Comic Art, so they decided in 1994 to expand these licenses by making a series of video games. This was probably done because in the previous years Simulmondo had a pretty good success by porting episodes of iconic Italian comic book heroes (like Dylan Dog, Diabolik and Tex) into PC games.

Since the games were produced by the same publisher who printed the comics, they were also distributed through newsagents just like their ink and paper counterparts.

Every package contained one floppy disk with the game on it plus a small 8-page booklet with an introduction from game designer Roberto Genovesi, the instructions for installation and gameplay, and a discount coupon for Comic Art comic books.

Do you think these could still be valid?

The publisher's original idea would have been to have further sequels to the first games in order to create an episodic series, but unfortunately the poor response from the buying public meant that the whole project was soon scrapped.
From the back cover of the booklets we can see the titles for the second episodes of each one of the characters, which were probably planned but never made. For Flash Gordon, this second episode would have been “Flash Gordon n.2: Il Torneo di Mongo”, i.e. Mongo's Tournament.

9900 lire are like 5 euros in today's money.

The most interesting thing about this packaging is the tagline “nessuno scarto di produzione” i.e. “this is not production waste”, which is surely a good omen for the quality of this game since all the best adventure games had similar slogans on the cover. Why, don’t you remember the classic tagline from Monkey Island “try this, it's totally not s**t, honest”?

But I digress.

Credits for this game are from a company called Holodream Software which frequently published games meant for sale in newsagents in 1990s to early 2000s. 

The splash background for the credits is pretty cool.

All of these guys are mostly credited only in these or similar newsagent games like “La Storia Ancestrale” from Hobby & Work.

Which to be fair seems totally metal.

For the life of me I didn’t manage to find the manual/booklet for this game anywhere on-line, but luckily I at least succeeded in retrieving some information on the keyboard commands from a web page that talked about this game. The commands (translated from Italian) are as follows: Right/Left = walk; Down = crouch; Up = take transversal routes; Enter = action; Right Shift = jump; Spacebar = Fist; F1 = Weapon; I = Inventory; Esc = save/quit.

Apart from the fantastic “take transversal routes” which ignites a spark of the imagination on what this game could actually be doing with such a command (spoiler: it’s simply “enter a path in the background”), from the list of commands my concerns are piqued that this is not really an adventure game, more a platformer or action game with some inventory slots and basic dialogue. Even more so when the instructions end with “You can use the mouse for movement, but several keys are still necessary”. 

Still, we start the game with a pretty well done comic book intro where Flash, Dale and Zarkov crash land on Mongo and are captured. Flash manages to escape from Emperor Ming’s forces and vows to free his companions from imprisonment.

Why is he in his underwear?

After this, the game proper starts.

Since this is an introduction post, please comment with your guesses on what the Final Rating for this game will be.

Session Time: 0 hours 10 minutes

Total Time: 0 hours 10 minutes

Note Regarding Spoilers and Companion Assist Points: There's a set of rules regarding spoilers and companion assist points. Please read it here before making any comments that could be considered a spoiler in any way. The short of it is that no CAPs will be given for hints or spoilers given in advance of me requiring one. As this is an introduction post, it's an opportunity for readers to bet 10 CAPs (only if they already have them) that I won't be able to solve a puzzle without putting in an official Request for Assistance: remember to use ROT13 for betting. If you get it right, you will be rewarded with 50 CAPs in return. It's also your chance to predict what the final rating will be for the game. Voters can predict whatever score they want, regardless of whether someone else has already chosen it. All correct (or nearest) votes will go into a draw.