Hello our friend, we are providing this page to inform you about the history, and the relevance, of our little great magazine.
Very long ago, in the first half of the 80s, there was no Internet (at least at home) and sources of information about videogames in Italy were rather scarce. We could buy a monthly magazine called Video Giochi, published by Gruppo Editoriale Jackson and some other minor publication, and when VG's team (Studio Vit) left Jackson to work on the italian edition of Zzap!64 a fresh new era began. In Italy, Zzap!64 was converted to a multiformat magazine and lost the '64' part of its name, and every month it brought translations from Newsfield mags and original contents written by the italian team. Thanks to its unprecedented, friendly approach, Zzap! quickly became the best selling italian magazine about videogames, later focusing on 8-bit systems only when a new magazine was born, The Games Machine, to cover the more powerful 16 and 32 bit platforms.
As a magazine on its own, Zzap! published 73 issues from may 1986 to december 1992, then it was included as a 16-page detachable insert with The Games Machine for another year, until the last issue (#84) on december 1993. Later on, it became a website for a couple of years and on may 2002 Xenia Edizioni, who kept the rights in Italy, allowed a group of volounteers (some former Zzap! editors and others) to create the new issue 85, published in PDF, following Gordon Houghton's effort on Zzap!64 #107. Zzap! issue 85 had big success and it has been downloaded thousands of times ever since.
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| All 84 issues of italian Zzap! have been digitized by "Progetto Zzap! Italia" and are now available at www.zzap.it |
Fast forward to december 2020, and part of those volounteers met again to found Airons di Vigevano, a non profit cultural association with the goal to valorise gaming and development of new games on classic platforms (a little different from classic meaning of retrogaming), and to restart publishing the most loved and iconic magazine of their era, Zzap!. We got permission to use the Zzap! name and logo from Chris Wilkins, Oliver Frey and Roger Kean and our new adventure began. Few hundreds copies of Italian Zzap! are now printed on paper and sent to members of the cultural association, while few spare copies are later placed on our e-shop. Every issue has a minimum of 48 pages, full colour, covering new games for Amiga, Commodore 64, Plus/4, Vic 20, ZX Spectrum, Atari ST, 400/800XL, 7800, MSX, Nintendo, SEGA, Atari consoles and other platforms among last century's 80s and 90s.
Obvioulsy, this is not our main job, but just a passion work we perform on our spare time. Some of us are still professional journalists who write on mainstream magazines and websites, others are employed or professionals in the IT world. Our commitment with all readers is to publish at least 3 or 4 issues of Zzap! every year, so they can expect to get a new issue of their favourite magazine every 3-4 months. Classic subscriptions are not available, while membership to our cultural association (which gives the right to get the magazine) is possible for Italy residents only, although spare copies in the e-shop can ship worldwide, with the addition of shipment cost (and the exceptions ruled by mail carriers, due to particular political or emergential situations of some countries).
