Quix or Stix?
Although our intentions were honourable and we genuinely thought the game was PD, there's no avoiding the fact that Quix was in fact the commercial, copyrighted game, Stix. Mea culpa.
in fact be a commercial title for which we didn't have the publishing rights? We'd better check. Roger asked to see the Supersoft game for comparison purposes, but we weren't optimistic.
We contacted the proprietor of the PD library from which we obtained Quix and asked him what was going on. It turned out he'd got the game from another PD library and had no idea it hadn't in fact been released into the public domain. Naturally, he trawled his roster for titles he'd also obtained from this library and checked them very carefully for
copyrighted titles.
A few days later, we received the Supersoft tape as requested. We loaded it up and took a look. Sure enough, Stix, which was first released in 1983, was identical to Quix. We were in trouble. A covering letter asked us to make a proposal for compensation. It seems our £50 ‘PD' game was going to cost us a lot more than anticipated. Our friend from the defunct software house didn't exactly wait patiently. Before we got back to him with our proposal, he sent his own to us, and it wasn't pretty reading. He suggested we pay £1000 to him (far more than the covermounting rights to a nine-year-old budget game was worth), and another £1000 to FAST (Federation Against Software Theft) for the purpose of policing public domain libraries. Two thousand quid, for a game that was basically a covertape filler!
Roger replied and explained that the going price for a game such as Stix was £400 (which was far more than the ZZAP! team would've
paid for it had it been offered to us at this price). The counter-offer was accepted, and a court case was avoided. Apart from paying £400 for a game we expected to cost £50, no significant damage was done.
Although ZZAP! 64 was undeniably
(if accidentally) in the wrong, we think it was a little cheeky for the former Supersoft proprietor to take the high moral ground. Remember in our description of Quix/Stix we wrote that the action sounded familiar? That's because it was in fact an unlicensed conversion of the Taito coin-op Qix, which had been released two years before Stix, in 1981. We were being pursued for copyright infringement of a game that itself infringed copyright.
As Roger Kean made clear, two wrongs did not make a right, so this was no defence against the copyright claim made against us. But it might have shot the moral high horse from under him had the case come to court, though.