Zoid (lost build of unreleased Apple II video game; 1980s)

Dr. Zoidberg.

Status: Lost

Zoid was a puzzle video game developed for the Apple II home computer in the 1980s. The game was developed by David X. Cohen, who would later go on to serve as the showrunner, executive producer, and head writer of the popular sci-fi comedy animated series Futurama, with Zoid serving as the namesake for the Futurama character Dr. Zoidberg.

Development

The story of Zoid began in the early 1980s, during which time David X. Cohen was an ardent player of arcade games such as Space Invaders and Gorf. In particular, he was a fan of Taito's 1981 puzzle arcade game Qix, in which a player uses a joystick to draw lines that subdivide the screen, with the ultimate goal of covering 75% of the playfield with these lines. Following his enrollment into Dwight Morrow High School, Cohen would decide to spend much of his free time developing his own version of Qix for the Apple II computer, with this game being titled Zoid. Cohen would spend two to three years developing Zoid in assembly language, ultimately completing the project in 1985.

Later in 1985, Cohen would submit the game to Brøderbund, an American video game developer and publisher best known for releasing games such as Prince of Persia, Myst, and the Carmen Sandiego series. Cohen had hoped that Brøderbund would approve of Zoid and would be willing to distribute it nationwide, but Brøderbund proved to be uninterested in the product, later returning his copy of the game to him along with a rejection letter in which they misspelled his last name as Cohan. Following this rejection, Cohen would make no further attempts to submit Zoid for publishing, and would never develop another game again.

Aftermath

Several years after Zoid's development, Cohen would begin a career as a television writer, eventually joining the writing staff of The Simpsons in 1993. Later, in the mid-1990s, Simpsons creator Matt Groening would enlist Cohen to help him develop characters and storylines for a sci-fi themed animated sitcom that he was attempting to pitch, with this series eventually becoming Futurama. One of the characters developed by Cohen was a parody of the Star Trek character Leonard McCoy, a human doctor who would frequently administer treatment to aliens. By contrast, Cohen's character was an alien doctor who would frequently administer treatment to humans despite his obvious lack of understand of human anatomy. While in Florida watching a space shuttle launch with Groening, Cohen would decide to name this character after his old video game, eventually coming up with the character name Dr. Zoidberg.

Cohen would first publicly acknowledge the origin of Dr. Zoidberg's name in the DVD commentary for the Futurama episode "The Series Has Landed", in which he stated that:

"Part of the inspiration for the name at least, Dr Zoidberg, was a video game I spend most of my high school years working on for the Apple II, which was called Zoid. So Zoidberg is a homage to that wasted three year period."

Cohen would later expand on this explanation in the DVD commentary for the Futurama episode "That's Lobstertainment!", in which he would detail the gameplay of Zoid, its development, and his attempts to get the game published through Brøderbund. Subtle references to Zoid would also be made within Futurama itself as well, such as through a visual gag in the episode "Fry and the Slurm Factory" where the robot character Bender is revealed to have an MOS 6502 microprocessor for a brain (with the Apple II computer itself having been built around the hardware of the MOS 6502, and Zoid having been written in MOS 6502 assembly language).

Cohen would detail Zoid's development history once again in a 2007 interview with Wired about the impact of video games on Futurama's development. Cohen would also reveal in this interview that he was still in possession of the original 5.1 inch floppy diskette on which Zoid was written, and that he would be interested in having someone else dump the game online for him if the opportunity presented itself. He claimed that he was unable to dump the game online himself due to the copy protection present on the disk, which involved the program checking for a bad sector on the disk before allowing itself to run, with this bad sector typically having a pinhole in it, or simply being left unformatted outright.

However, despite the Wired article ending with an open invitation for readers to assist Cohen in having the game's assets dumped online, the game remains unavailable to be played to this day, with no footage or stills from it ever having surfaced.

Gallery

David X. Cohen discussing Zoid in the DVD commentary for "The Series Has Landed".

David X. Cohen discussing Zoid in the DVD commentary for "That's Lobstertainment!".

External Links

• Wikipedia page for David X. Cohen.
• Wikipedia page for Dr. Zoidberg.
• The Infosphere page for Dr. Zoidberg.