Bonaventura Di Bello


Bonaventura Di Bello is the co-founder, with his wife Adelaide and his brother Massimiliano, of Brainstorm Enterprise, an early publisher of games for home computers.
Born in Centola, Italy, Bonaventura was the most active Italian writer of adventure-style game for personal computers, since 1985. For the large number of games and national popularity in the Italian IF tradition, he could be defined as the Italian Scott Adams. Like Adams', his text adventure games used a minimal parser, recognizing 2-word commands of the form VERB NOUN and where released on most of the major home PC platforms of the day, including Sinclair Spectrum, Commodore 64, and MSX. The games were programmed using a software called The Quill and contained a form of Vector graphics while the MSX versions had no graphics and where programmed using the platform's BASIC language upon a routine reprogrammed from the original code written by Italian programmer Enrico Colombini. Some of Bonaventura's adventure games where co-authored by Gianpaolo Gentili, and credits are shown in the games' splash page where due.
When the adventure games trend expired in Italy, Bonaventura became chief editor of the Italian version of Newsfield Publications Ltd's Zzap!64 videogames magazine and, one year later, of the Italian version of same publisher's magazine The Games Machine.
In the following years Bonaventura has worked on various editorial projects for several Italian IT publishers, planning, creating, writing and translating whole magazines or single articles, both on paper, on disc and the Web with single blogs or whole blog networks. He's also author of the book, Internet Tour '95, which was one of the first guides and directories about the Internet in Italy before the WWW era.
He currently owns an editorial and communications services company called MediaMagic, and writes also under the nickname Jack Ventura, specialising in contents creation and management.
Bonaventura's games are available on various Web sites in a format compatible with Commodore 64 and Spectrum emulators.

Games

Author Credits

NOTE: All these games are in Italian.