Naps Team is the oldest continuously operating game studio in Italy, founded in Messina, Sicily in 1993 by Fabio Capone and Domenico Barba. Like many software houses of the period the team cut its teeth on the 16-bit Amiga, and its first success arrived almost immediately: Shadow Fighter, published by Gremlin Interactive in 1994, was a one-on-one fighter fast and polished enough that Amiga Power ranked it the twentieth best game of all time in 1996. The relationship with Gremlin carried the studio onto consoles with Gekido: Urban Fighters, a 2000 PlayStation brawler, and the Sicilian team kept the series alive on its own terms with Gekido Advance: Kintaro's Revenge for the Game Boy Advance in 2002.
Where many studios of that generation were absorbed or closed, Naps Team stayed small, independent and in Messina. Iron Wings, a Kickstarter-backed arcade air-combat game that puts two pilots under the player's control across Second World War battlefields, arrived in 2017 and reached consoles afterwards, and the studio followed it in 2018 with a remaster of Gekido: Kintaro's Revenge for Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. Baldo: The Guardian Owls, a 2021 action-RPG that pairs Zelda-style adventuring with a hand-drawn look inspired by Studio Ghibli, showed the same two-founder outfit still willing to attempt big ideas three decades in. For players the appeal is continuity - a catalogue that runs from Amiga fighters to modern multi-platform releases, made by the same people who started it.
