Qix

Qix ( KIKS) is a 1981 puzzle video game developed and published by Taito for arcades. Designed by husband and wife team Randy and Sandy Pfeiffer, Qix is one of a handful of games made by Taito's American division (another is Zoo Keeper). At the start of each level, the playing field is a large, empty rectangle, containing the Qix, an abstract stick-like entity that performs graceful but unpredictable motions within the confines of the rectangle. The objective is to draw lines that close off parts of the rectangle to fill in a set amount of the playfield. Qix was ported to the contemporary Atari 5200 (1982), Atari 8-bit computers (1983), and Commodore 64 (1983), then was brought to a wide variety of systems in the late 1980s and early 1990s: MS-DOS (1989), Amiga (1989), another version for the C64 (1989), Apple IIGS (1990), Game Boy (1990), Nintendo Entertainment System (1991), and Atari Lynx (1991). Multiple home and arcade sequels followed and the concept was widely cloned. In the Gals Panic series from Kaneko, each captured area is not filled with a color, but reveals part of an image of a woman; this itself has been cloned into erotic-oriented games based on the concept of Qix.