A QUIX UP THE ASS...
Ian Osborne looks back on a cover tape game that caused a bit of a fuss.
When is a Public Domain game not PD asks Ian Osborne? When it's a commercial product that somehow found its way into a PD library.
How much trouble can one game cause? There was The Great Giana Sisters, a blatant Super Mario Bros clone which caused a lot of trouble for its publisher when Nintendo threatened legal actrion. There was Cannon Fodder, which got an issue
of Amiga Power taken off the shelves for using a poppy on the cover. And who could forget Manhunt, a game so violent it was banned in several countries and (wrongly) implicated in a UK murder case? For ZZAP! 64, one game which caused significant trouble was a simple ‘PD' title we used for the covertape; Quix, ‘a PD rave from the grave'.
It was a simple affair. You control a small blob that patrols the outer perimeter of the playing area. Hold the fire button and you can make incursions into enemy territory, where you can be killed by the bad guy if he touches your blob or the trail it leaves behind as you travel – an interesting mathematical effect based on straight lines. Make it back to your own territory, and the area you've boxed off with your trail becomes yours. When you've captured 75% of the screen in this manner, the baddie is killed, and you
move on to the next level. Sound familiar? We'll come back to that later.
It was a decent game, but no great looker. As we wrote in ZZAP! 64
Issue 89 when we put it on the covertape, ‘despite appearances it plays really well'. Not a lead game, but a decent enough. Since it was a cheap way of filling up the covertape and a decent enough game to boot, we were happy to pay the £50 finder's fee to the PD library that sent it to us. We sent the disk with the rest of the games to our duplicators, and on the mag it went.
After the issue hit the shelves, our publisher, Roger Kean, received a rather disturbing fax (remember them?). The owner of a by-then defunct software company claimed that Quix wasn't a PD game at all. It was, in fact, a Supersoft game called Stix, programmed by Andrew Trott. This didn't bode well. When you booted up Quix from the covertape, you could see Andrew Trott's name on the screen. Could our ‘public domain' game