Chapter forthcoming, Ludologica Retro: Vintage Games Volume 1: Vintage Arcade (1971-1984), ed. Matteo Bittanti and Ian Bogost. Melanie Swalwell and Michael Davidson, "Malzak"1 Introduction
During its heyday, "Malzak" would have been played alongside arcade classics such as "Asteroids" (1979), "Defender" (1980), and "Donkey Kong" (1981). Yet while these other games are now household names, with original examples highly sought after by arcade game collectors, "Malzak" remains little known, its name only meaningful to a handful of New Zealanders of a certain age. This is because "Malzak" was New Zealand’s own arcade game. To date, no serious research has been done on the early New Zealand game industry and little documentary information is available about "Malzak". The absence of more sources dating from Malzak’s own time is regrettable. The unwillingness of Malzak’s creator and the owner of Kitset Electronics, Ralph Stevenson, to tell his story further limit the available sources. Michael Davidson, a collector of New Zealand made games, is one who remembers playing this game as a youngster in the 1980s. His story, related here, contributes to an understanding of "Malzak" in its own time, while his subsequent collecting activities help to better understand its status retrospectively. Given the limited number of sources, it is fortunate that some examples of the game "Malzak" are still in existence. Though the remains Davidson has located to date (like so many other early arcade games) are not in working condition, they are far from mute, continuing to testify about the game and its manufacture. Necessarily, then, this chapter relies heavily on a return to the game as material and digital object, in an attempt to reconstruct something of its past, present and future. Images of the cabinet, board, and some screenshots, can be found at http://www.retrogames.co.nz/ This chapter has come out of a collaborative effort between Davidson (a collector) and myself (a media studies academic), based initially on an interview we recorded in November 2004, when he was gracious enough to talk me through his collection of New Zealand games. Since then, we have kept up a regular discourse on researching and archiving New Zealand made games. In this chapter, drawing on Davidson’s specific recollections and explanations, we set out what is known about "Malzak", and chart our respective interests in, and perspectives on, this arcade game. We introduce "Malzak" and situate it in the New Zealand arcade industry of the 1980s, before discussing its resemblance to another popular arcade game, and considering its possible status as a variation or clone. In doing so, we question the appropriateness of continuing to think about arcade games in terms of notions of "original" and "copy". We further discuss "Malzak’s" revival through the MAME project, and its usefulness as a case study that furthers understanding of the local products and "variations" produced by early videogame industries, worldwide. For Davidson, Malzak is special as a New Zealand made game that "a lot of people seem to remember". For me, Malzak points to a remarkable do-it-yourself ethos, at a moment when New Zealand was still a long way away from the rest of the world, in part due to trade barriers still extant in the early 1980s. Introducing "Malzak"
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Malzak Title Screen
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"Malzak" is a side view shooter, in which the player must fly their spacecraft through all sectors to destroy Malzak, the bad guy ("Boss") after whom the game is named. It was manufactured by a company called Kitronix, or Kitset Electronics Limited. Based in Auckland, Kitronix was a player in what seems to have been a vibrant local arcade production industry, despite – or perhaps because of – New Zealand’s strict import licensing regime (Swalwell 2005). The company produced a number of different games, including several black and white racing car games (well before Malzak), "Galactic Invaders", "Panix", and a light gun rifle game. Made around 1981, "Malzak" bears some resemblances to, and has been described as a clone of, Konami’s classic "Scramble", also of 1981. The clone issue is one we’ll discuss later in the chapter, considering whether and in what ways "Malzak" might be a ‘clone’. But to begin with, let us dazzle you with Malzak’s technical specifications.Malzak boasted a Signetics S2650 CPU (@950KHz), with 2 SN76477 sound chips (also @950KHz). Kitronix appears to have procured or made everything they used in the games locally with the exception of the Monitor and Chassis. The Artwork and cabinets were, for the most part, pretty basic. The artwork is simply silkscreened onto glass (in the case of the marquee) and the remainder onto plastic. The cabinets were fitted with locally produced joysticks quite unlike those used on other arcade machines, giving the controls a different look and feel. These 8 way joysticks are, however, quite responsive. In a conversation with Davidson, Ralph Stevenson, the owner of Kitronix, stated that the game was developed within the company on Apple II computers. "Malzak" stories
M.D.: I think I first saw "Malzak" when I was on a family holiday at Lake Taupo. We stayed at a motor camp on the edge of the lake at a place called Acacia Bay. Like other motels in those days, they had a games room, a space where they’d started off having a pool table and a ping-pong table, and then they had added some arcade games. "Malzak" was one of these. I must have put lots of twenty-cent pieces in. I would get to a certain stage and could never get any further. I remembered it as being a really good game.I didn’t see "Malzak" again until the early 1990s, when I was in Palmerston North visiting a friend, and I happened to be in a second hand shop where they had an auction on. There was a "Malzak" machine in the auction. I really wanted to stay for this auction and buy it, but as I was travelling back on the bus to Dunedin where I was studying, it wasn’t very practical to buy it. I didn’t buy it, but I wrote down the name of the game, because I’d never been able to remember this. Later, in about 1997, when I began collecting arcade machines, I would ask on the Usenet forums rec.games.video.arcade.collecting whether any collectors knew of a game called "Malzak".2 I assumed it was a game that was common everywhere and had no idea at that stage that it had been made in New Zealand. I would say, "It’s a lot like Scramble", but everyone said no, they’d never heard of it. The only people who ever replied were people from New Zealand. They’d say things like "Yeah, I remember that game, it was great. Tell me, have you found it?" For a long time we assumed it was just "Scramble" with a different name. I tracked down the cabinet before I tracked down the game board itself. When I tracked down the machine, it had "made by Kitset Electronics, New Zealand" written on it. I thought this was a bit strange. Eventually I tracked down someone who had a board and it was clearly marked "Kitset Electronics", and then I tracked down the owner of the company and asked him and he confirmed that they had made the game completely from the "ground up" here in New Zealand. This solved the mystery of why no-one else in the world had ever heard of the game: it was a uniquely New Zealand product" The 1980s New Zealand Game Industry
Arcade games were big in New Zealand in the 1980s. At least in part due to import restrictions then in place and incentives for the local electronics industry, more than a few companies were involved in arcade game manufacture. Some just seem to have manufactured cabinets in which imported game components were housed. A number of those who had import licenses and were able to bring foreign games in, owned and ran arcades. Kitronix does not seem to have followed this model of vertical integration, concentrating on deploying its electronics know-how to develop machines. Possibly the games were just for sale to others, or possibly they were sited on others’ premises, a business model that was very lucrative for other early manufacturers of arcade machines such as Chastronics and later, Spacetec Coin Ltd. We understand that Kitronix exported some machines to clients in Australia. Since he began collecting games, Davidson has owned several Malzak cabinets, however, none have been in working condition. When cabinets appear for sale, as happens from time to time, the prices sought for them and the conditions under which they have usually been stored reflect the low cultural esteem in which digital games have historically been held, though clearly this is changing as videogames become collectible. Given Malzak’s rarity and limited distribution and the absence of known working examples, the MAME Project provides the only way that the game can now be played or seen working in a way that approximates how it used to run. The MAME Project is an important archiving effort focussed exclusively on arcade games. Fortunately, the MAME team has understood that there is a need to act now to archive arcade games such as "Malzak", if the digital heritage that they constitute is to be preserved into the future. The MAME project
MAME stands for Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator. It is an emulation project that attempts to preserve out of date arcade games, by getting around the issue of obsolete hardware. MAME is a software program that imitates, or emulates, this hardware. By emulating out of date arcade hardware and operating systems, the game code of many early games can be read and run on current generation computers. Nicola Salmoria began the project in late 1996, building single hardware emulators, which he merged into one program in early 1997. A team of people around the world continue the initiative. Operating with an open source philosophy, the purpose of the MAME project is preservation, through faithful emulation. As the project’s website says: MAME’s purpose is to preserve these decades of video-game history. As gaming technology continues to rush forward, MAME prevents these important "vintage" games from being lost and forgotten. This is achieved by documenting the hardware and how it functions, thanks to the talent of programmers from the MAME team and from other contributors (Monroe, Fielding et al, 2005, G.01). But MAME is more than just an emulator, or a collection of emulators. The MAME project also involves collecting and reading game code off the circuit boards of arcade games, and storing this, essentially a form of software based archiving. The code of arcade games is read by "dumping" a game’s ROMS. Dumping "is a general description for the process involving removing EPROMs from an arcade board, reading them into the EPROM programmers’ memory, then saving this information as a file on to a computer" (The Guru, n.d.). Once the data from a game’s board has been "dumped", it is stored in digital format, meaning that there is an electronic copy of the game information. In 2002, the game code for "Malzak" was dumped and given to the MAME project, after Davidson encouraged a Hamilton based collector, Garrick Laing, who had the game board in his possession to send it to "The Guru", a MAME contributor in Australia, who dumped the ROMs and passed them onto the MAME team. Judging from "The Guru’s" comments, the Malzak board was quite a sight: This board looks like an early proto, it's hand etched, with a ton of wire mods. I'm told the game is kind of like Scramble. It's probably _ultra_ rare too.
The board looks like pure crap actually, with lot's of resistors jumpering tracks and a partial harness that is wired directly to the logic chips which has been *ruthlessly* chopped off! (no hope of screenshots, sorry)
(The Guru, 2/11/2002, http://www.mameworld.net/maws/driverinfo/malzak.c) The types of wire mods discussed here are visible in the picture below, which is a photograph taken of another Malzak board. The question of a prototype is one we’ll return to.Emulating "Malzak"
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Malzak Board
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Getting an arcade game to run on a piece of software that is emulating its original hardware is not easy. (Hardware obsolescence and the challenges associated with getting old software to run on current platforms, are not unique to digital game archiving; it is an issue that comes up in archiving all software.) The MAME developers strive for faithful emulation of games, but this can mean that not all games whose ROMs are in MAME are playable: as the developers write, being able to play the games "is just a nice side-effect, which doesn’t happen all the time" (Monroe, Fielding et al, G.01). This is what happened for a time with "Malzak". At any one time the MAME Team have lots of ROMs for games that are yet to be emulated. Someone from the team has to take an interest in developing a "driver" to make the game run. Only when a driver exists for a game is the game actually included in MAME and the ROMs publicly "released". After some months, Davidson started asking MAME Developers whether anyone had picked up the task of attempting to emulate the Malzak ROMs. He discovered that a New Zealander, Barry Rodewald, was a MAME Developer, and after contacting him, Rodewald became interested enough in Malzak as a New Zealand game to get hold of the ROMs and, in November 2003, he started work writing the first Malzak driver. In December of that year, version 0.77u3 of MAME was released, and it included Rodewald’s Malzak driver. Currently, there are still some issues with Malzak’s function in MAME: the sound doesn’t emulate and the in-game collisions do not work. Getting other things about the game emulating correctly, like the colours, also takes time and effort. Particularly with a game like "Malzak" where no one has seen it running for twenty years and there doesn’t seem to be any documentation available that shows these things, getting such details ‘correct’ poses a challenge; necessarily, it entails a degree of guesswork.Analysing "Malzak"
To return to the game object itself, the actual process of ‘dumping’ Malzak’s ROMs revealed crucially important information about the game’s development and provenance. While it is not the main aim of the project, the processes conducted are tantamount to another method for researching games history, in that they allow analysis of the digital code. The MAME Team found that when the game code from Malzak’s ROMs was analysed, none of the code was like that of any other game currently in MAME. Simply put, "Malzak" is an original game, at least in the sense that it was coded from scratch. This point is a significant one, because it was not unknown in the 1980s arcade industry to reuse portions of code from an earlier game, or even an entire game, without the owner’s permission. In September 1981, Wellington’s Evening Post carried a story in which Chris Loomans claimed that close copies of licensed arcade games were being illegally operated in New Zealand. Loomans was the managing director of Advance Automatics, a company that was then the local agent for Atari, Stern and Williams and Gottlieb games. These U.S. companies were reportedly putting pressure on him to crack down on illegal copies, and Loomans is reported to have placed newspaper advertisements "warning people about the practice", and publicising that "copyrights will be strictly enforced" by these companies, in the courts if need be. Representatives of Atari…told him people overseas were buying their machines, taking the programme out, copying it, and installing this in machines similar in looks and technically identical.
He [Loomans] said the copying was mainly being done in Japan and Taiwan. He did not think it was being done here yet, but said people were buying either finished machines, or just the copied programme, then constructing bodies and marketing the machine here.
Clearly, concern about copyright infringement is not confined to our own time. The MAME team’s analysis of Malzak, then, provides independent verification of what Kitronix’s owner, Ralph Stevenson told Davidson: that his company had written the game, from the ground up.
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Malzak Joystick
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A closer examination of the game cabinet further supports Malzak’s claim to being a local developed and manufactured game, moreover, one produced by a company whose D-I-Y ethic pervaded all aspects of the operation. As already noted, the cabinetry bears the Kitronix name. It was not unusual for New Zealand companies to make their own arcade cabinets in this period (presumably it was cheaper for those who were importing arcade games to bring in the internal components and make a box locally in which to house these). However, Kitronix not only made their own cabinets, they also manufactured their own buttons: these are made of metal rather than the more common plastic. Furthermore, they made their own (metal) joysticks. Finally, the artwork on the cabinets was done in-house, with the marquee designs simply silk-screened onto glass. The artwork on the lower part of the cabinet offers the chance to see the homespun nature of the production at close quarters. A wonderful visual, when the piece is turned over, the paint appears to have been applied to the Perspex by hand, a relatively low-tech, almost artisanal, method of application. While it still makes for a fine looking graphic, the homemade ethic somewhat belies the overt futurism of this "space age" game. In viewing the artwork, the question of Malzak’s status as an original game resurfaces. The visual resemblance of the "Malzak" artwork to some "Scramble" artwork is strong, with the imagery on the lower portion of the Malzak cabinet reminiscent of that seen on some overseas flyers for "Scramble", notably the flyer for the U.S. market, manufactured by Stern-Seeburg (viewable online at The Arcade Flyer). Might "Malzak" be a clone of "Scramble", albeit an originally coded clone?The word "clone" has all sorts of connotations, none of them particularly positive. To be labelled a "clone" connotes that a product is a rip off in some way, a copy that is too close to the original to be distinguished in any meaningful way; which, although it might be different in a small way, is basically the same, a derivative product. To our contemporary sensibilities, it also raises legal questions, of intellectual property and its infringement. Beyond observing the dates ("Malzak" and "Scramble" both date from 19813) and similar features (both games are side scrollers, requiring that players navigate over hills and avoid collisions with objects in their path), we do not have information that would allow us to say that one is necessarily a copy of the other, particularly given that the game code is different. It is, however, hard to dismiss the similarities at the level of gameplay. Yet even supposing that a known link was discovered between "Scramble" and the subsequent design of "Malzak", there is a fundamental question here that needs to be considered, concerning the notion of originality. It needs to be acknowledged that we are discussing videogames, which are mass produced digital artefacts. What sense would it make to say that "Malzak" is the "clone" of "Scramble" the "original"? In 1936, some sixty-five years ago, the German theorist Walter Benjamin wrote of the transformation the notions of "original" and "copy" were undergoing, in the wake of technical changes. For Benjamin, the changes that mechanical means of reproduction, such as photography and film, had wrought on the work of art, and the masses’ desire to get hold of things up close, by way of reproductions, exacerbated the decay of what he called "aura". If we think about it, videogames have even less claim to being singular items with a "unique existence in time and space" than the objects on which Benjamin was reflecting. We can extend Benjamin’s insight that "the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility", to recognise that not only was the code of early videogames able to be copied, but that at a time when versions of a popular arcade game would quickly appear for home consoles and programmable microcomputers, it was expected – or even required – that games be ported. It therefore makes less sense to seek to canonise one as "the" original, and the rest as mere copies. Re-creating a game played at an arcade on one’s BBC or Sega at home was the norm, not the exception. As Davidson says: "It’s like Pacman was Munchman, and Muncher and Puc-muncher and all these other names that were very similar". The September 1984 issue of the New Zealand home computing magazine Sega Computer sports an example of this, in a review of "Munchman", written by Terry Johnson for the Sega SC-3000. It is "the classic maze chase game at its best", and apart from crediting the programmer for coding a game that in one sense is clearly "Pacman", the reference in the last sentence of the review to "arcade quality graphics and sound" makes it clear that Johnson is being recognised for writing a version of the popular arcade game for the Sega computer, not for inventing a new game. It seems reasonable to suggest that in keeping the look of his game the same as "Pacman," Johnson was paying the game a kind of homage. Potentially, something similar might be the case with "Malzak" and "Scramble", and other versions of games that have been called clones. One intriguing possibility that directly relates to the porting of games and their having recognisable influences, is that the inspiration for "Malzak" derived not from an arcade game, but from a home ('cloned') version of "Scramble". Another Kitronix game helps to see how this could have happened. Their arcade game "Panix", bears a strong resemblance to "Space Panic" (1980, Universal), a game that was released on the Apple II computer as "Apple Panic". Given that Kitronix were developing on the Apple II, its possible that the inspiration for writing "Panix" (which we presume was locally coded, like Malzak) came from the computer game "Apple Panic", rather than the arcade game "Space Panic". Similarly, it is possible that the source material for "Malzak" was a home computer version of "Scramble", not an arcade game. While this is purely speculation, it nicely illustrates the relevance of Benjamin’s point to digital games: these are not only designed to be reproduced in the sense that many copies can be made of digital code quickly; in a way these games became a kind of meme that circulated and which people were challenged to reproduce, reinventing and remaking a similar game, in different coded forms.4 In the early video game era, the principle of reproducibility was further supplemented by those of interchangeability and interoperability, as the space of the arcade became a laboratory where hybrids were invented through pragmatic adaptation and re-engineering. Many games were hacked to run on systems that they weren’t designed for, spawning variations that are themselves recognised as "masterpieces" by the MAME team, who do not just recognise the "original" or "official" versions of games. The number of games in MAME provides an indication of how common this practice was. "The latest version [of MAME] is 0.100, which supports 3166 unique games and 5778 actual ROM sets" (mame.net, "Download"). From the analysis of game ROMs, the MAME team are able to say that the higher figure of 5778 includes various "clones" and variations of "original" games; that is, around 45% of the total number of game ROMs are variations. The MAME FAQ gives examples of the highly innovative 'overcoming' of hardware incompatibilities. In some cases, ROMs were hacked to run on hardware they were not intended for. For example, when Pac-Man was "hot," some arcade operators found a way to dump Pac-Man ROMs and hack them to work on Scramble machines* so they wouldn't have to purchase extra Pac-Man boards. Since these hacked versions are masterpieces in their own right, the MAME developers have included them. (Monroe, Fielding et al, M.01) In the current context, Scramble’s famed lack of protection is significant. The Killer List of Videogames notes that Scramble had no copy protection; in fact, Scramble seems to have been particularly easy to hack. The asterisked footnote in the above excerpt reads:*Apparently, Scramble's board was especially easy to re-use; several games were hacked to play on it. A long-running joke with MAME enthusiasts is that anything can be run on Scramble hardware - N64 games, your toaster, your automatic garage door, etc. :?) (Ironically, Scramble itself was hacked to play on Galaxian hardware!)
(Monroe, Fielding et al, M.01) To their credit, the MAME team are keen to include as many of these alternate versions and less orthodox ‘solutions’ or hacks as possible. Recognising that these variations are also part of the history of arcade games, and that many versions and variations are extremely rare, the MAME project not only has a "Most Wanted" list of game boards posted, it also has a "Most Wanted Clones/Bootlegs List". This recognises that, Numerous games have been licensed, bootlegged, or hacked in hopes of making easy profits without actually having to develop something original. Many such cloned games have interesting gameplay variations, are historically important, or are the only version of the game that was available in a given region. Regardless, in the interest of completeness, we're interested in dumps of many early clones such as those listed here (and this is not an exhaustive list!). http://targets.mame.net/clones.html Not just a Scramble clone
M.D.: "Malzak" is not just "Scramble". There are similarities but there are also differences. They built it from scratch, coded it from scratch. Kitronix wrote the game, from the ground up. Scramble had two buttons, one for bombs and one for firing, whereas "Malzak" had a simplified set of controls, only one button which fires and bombs at the same time. The processor used and board hardware is completely different from that used on Scramble. Kitronix made the board from the ground up, using a hardware platform that was easily obtainable here and cheap to produce.Malzak II
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Malzak Cabinet
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Furthermore, there is evidence that Kitronix was committed to "Malzak’s" development, beyond the initial writing and release of the game. In June 2005, Davidson purchased a Malzak cabinet on trademe, the New Zealand Internet auction site. This cleared up a number of mysteries. It was a different style of cabinet to the one he’d previously owned, confirming his suspicion that there had been two types of cabinets. The Perspex sheet of artwork he’d owned for some time had also posed a mystery, in terms of where it went on the cabinet, as it was too large for a marquee. As he said to me in an email: "As you can see from the pictures the mystery of where the artwork goes has been solved!". While the cabinet itself had some water damage at the bottom, and was missing its entire power supply and monitor chassis, it was overall in remarkably good condition. After taking possession of this trademe "Malzak" cabinet, Davidson again arranged for the game ROMs to be dumped to verify that the original set was good. To his surprise he found that many of the ROMS were different to those that had previously been dumped.This version was "Malzak II" according to text found in the ROMs, a different version of the game to the one that was previously dumped and emulated in MAME. While this doesn’t prove that the first version was a prototype ("Malzak II"’s game board also looked homemade), it does suggest that Malzak was popular enough with the public and with operators to warrant producing a revised version. The main differences are: players can choose between Malzak v.1 and Malzak v. 2; each version offers different game terrain; there is a high score initial save; and with Malzak II it was possible to insert another coin to continue the game. Malzak II has now been added to MAME, again by Barry Rodewald (added in MAME 0.97u1). Conclusion
As interesting as it is to ponder the similarities between a locally produced game like "Malzak" and an international hit like "Scramble", Malzak is perhaps more significant for the insights it provides into the blend of local and global factors affecting game design in a small market like New Zealand in the 1980s. It seems likely that the game drew on non-local influences (the widely released hit, "Scramble"), yet this game concept was given a local treatment, and was manufactured using local talent at every stage, from the coding, to the joystick design, to the electrical and electronics know how, and manufacturing nouse. Potentially, "Malzak" suggests, there are many other games whose stories are as compelling and complex, which are currently just lumped together under the generic labels of "clone" or "local product". Today, typing "Malzak" into a search engine brings up many hits. There are sites hosting the game ROMs for download in Polish, Russian, Spanish, and German, as well as English. While it is not illegal to have a copy of MAME on a computer, possessing game ROMs for which one doesn’t own the board is a legal grey area (Monroe, Fielding et al, G.06). While this goes to the issue of copying code that was earlier demonstrated to be a vexatious issue in the 1980s, and which continues to be one in the 2000s, ironically, it is the existence of multiple copies of the ROMs of a game such as "Malzak" that boosts the chances of the game’s surviving into the future. References
Benjamin, Walter (1992 [1936]) "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction", Harry Zohn, trans., Illuminations, Hannah Arendt (ed.), London: Fontana, pp. 219-253. mame.net (2005) "Download", http://www.mame.net/download.html, accessed 3/10/05. Monroe, Shane R., Andy Fielding et al. (last update 16/8/05) "Frequently Asked Questions v0.99wip" http://www.mame.net/mamefaq.html, accessed 3/10/05. No author given, "Amusement pirates risk real war in Earth’s courts", The Evening Post, 5 September 1981. No author, "Scramble", Killer List of Videogames, http://www.klov.com/game_detail.php?letter=&game_id=9447, accessed 3/10/05. No author, "Software Review: Munchman", Sega Computer, Sept 1984, p. 24. Stern-Seeburg (1981) U.S. Scramble flyer, The Arcade Flyer Archive, http://www.arcadeflyers.net/?page=flyerdb&subpage=thumbs&id=944, accessed 3/10/05. Swalwell, Melanie (2005) "Early Games Production in New Zealand", DiGRA Conference: "Changing Views: Worlds in Play", 17-20 June 2005, DiGRA Proceedings, available at http://www.gamesconference.org/digra2005/viewabstract.php?id=81, accessed 3/10/05. The Guru (n.d) "The Guru’s Rom Dumping News: Genuine Questions Section", http://www.mameworld.net/gurudumps/faq.html, accessed 29/9/05.
1Research for this chapter was made possible by a Faculty Research Grant, Humanities and Social Sciences, Victoria University of Wellington.
2One of the original requests for information: Davidson (1997) "Q: Info. On Scramble Clone "Malzak" wanted", June 20, http://groups.google.co.nz/group/rec.games.video.arcade.collecting/tree/browse_frm/thread/
28eb055c6d0d00f7/d7b811dc702c9393, accessed 3/10/05.
3The Malzak artwork has an "R" next to the date, indicating that the name was a registered trademark. Inquiries into historic trademark registrations revealed that the name "Malzak" was registered as a trademark, on 19th November, 1981 (abandoned 1st March, 1990). While the file card was found, the file itself is missing, meaning that the holder of this trademark could not be ascertained, though it seems likely that this would have been Kitronix (author’s correspondence, Archives New Zealand, 25/10/05).
4Incidentally, this parallels the classic explanation of copyright law that is offered to the layperson, namely that copyright only protects a particular expression of an idea (for instance, a particular novel or painting), not the idea itself from being drawn upon by others. Those who Loomans was threatening to act against in the aforementioned newspaper story, if indeed they were using copied boards, might have been guilty of infringing copyright. The use of a game’s visual ideas as opposed to its code would, presumably, be a less clear cut legal matter.
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