My real name is Davide Orlando, I was born in 1975 and I live in Como, in the north of Italy. Como is a town of about 90.000 people located on the west branch of the lake with the same name, an area well known for silk processing since a long time and it was the birthplace of the scientist Alessandro Volta.
I studied Computer Science at the Polytechnic of Como - actually for way too much time before realizing I'd better do on my own - and I also worked part-time as a barman and waiter, until I decided to put all my resources into my software projects.
My nickname is Albegor, a name I initially created for my AD&D character a very long time ago, but later it became my virtual alter ego when I began using it to play Quake2 online. Its etymology is so demential that only a few friends know what it means exactly.

This is my personal Business Card, a very fine piece of artwork kindly made for me by Pier Tommaso Bennati, a talented Italian graphics artist active in the game development industry since the Amiga times, now working as a freelance.
He did a nice restyling of the C-like expression you can see at the top of each page of my website and which condenses the three key components required to make top quality software, but he also restyled the squared logo with the hand and the CD representing the creation of software: the hand come from the famous Michelangelo's fresco La Creazione di Adamo and, if you look closely at it, the lightning has the shape of the Lake of Como.
But that's not all because as background he choose a picture of an Amiga monitor and an expert eye can certainly notice the peculiar Moiré effect.
I printed the Business Cards thanks to VistaPrint and the gloss effect enhances even more the monitor background. I really like it and I always love to explain its meaning to the people who take it and immediately look at it with curiosity.

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I often read that many professional game programmers began programming since the golden age of the Commodore 64. I've actually discovered the art of the programming much later and I still wonder if I've lost anything and what...
Since I was a child, like all children of course, I was very addicted to videogames in general, both by the arcade ones and by the small pocket ones such as the Nintendo Game&Watch, a couple of which I still jealously safeguard.
My first computer was the Commodore Vic20. Despite I had only two games, Pacman and a space shooter and few friends to exchange them with, I spent quite a lot of time with them. I remember that I also tried to program in Basic language following the examples written on the manual, but my programming knowledge was too limited and I hadn't enough motivations to expand it, so after a while I came back the my beloved Legos, which I called "constructions," and to more traditional games like small soldiers or small cars. So I stayed away from computers until I bought my first real PC, an Olivetti 286 and since then my gaming experience began.
The first contact with programming took place only at the first year of university, when they taught me the old Modula2, a language similar to the Pascal, during the basic computer science class and although I immediately started to appreciate the potentialities offered by a programming language, at the end of the class there was a question in particular that bothered me: How damn I could get the control of each individual pixel on the screen, just like they did in videogames. The question found an answer during the advanced computer science class in which I learned Assembly. I wrote "I learned" instead of "they taught me" to accentuate the fact that if I hadn't learnt by myself I would have known just as before...
It was love at first sight with assembly, I finally was able to control the computer up to the minimums details and it didn't take much time to understand it was what I needed to create any graphics effect and then to make videogames. In that time I discovered Internet also and it was thank to it that I managed to expand my programming knowledge.
So I began to experiment in DOS and I learned at my expenses that if I ever wanted to program a videogame I would not ever be able to make it in proper times only using assembly. Then I learned C by myself and I continued my experiments with a recipe based on C and Asm in the right doses.
The idea to program a game like Strike or Die was born in this time while playing strategy classics such as the Battle Isle series by Blue Byte, but for countless reasons the development went on sobbing for a long time, until the beginning of the year 2000, when I decided that it was time to do it seriously.
I then downloaded the DirectX7 SDK, I abandoned the DOS and with a good experience of C and Asm on my shoulders I started to program Strike or Die.
Obviously I had to overcome quite a lot of obstacles that seemed almost insuperable to whoever embarks on such a project, but had it been easy it would not have been fun.
So in that year the development proceeded slowly during my spare time. In November, as you can read in my old development diary, I opened Strike or Dies's website and published a nice demo of the game that attracted the attention of many players. That really encouraged me and I was ready to continue the development with more energy, but towards the end of the year I received a job offer I could not reject from Trecision, a well known Italian software house, now closed unfortunately. Although I don't like to take important decisions in a hurry I thought it was a great opportunity for me.
So I moved to Rapallo and began working with a very friendly team. The experience in Trecision did not lasted long because after some months I decided to leave to take care of some important personal matters, but it has been a fundamental experience because I learnt a lot of things about professional game development and it changed my rhythm of work and the way I develop games.
The last news in my old development diary go back to February 2001 after I released the demo version 3.0 of Strike or Die. That could have been the end of the history of my first game project, but in the month of September of 2001, just after the tragic terrorist attack to the twin towers I took back my old sources and resumed coding almost without being aware of it.
Well, you can read the rest of the story in the last development diary on the Strike or Dies's website, but I can say I followed my hearth and only time will tell me if I did the right choice.

To be continued...