Production
The game was heavily inspired by the many popular theories about aliens, ancient astronauts and mysterious civilizations. The many places visited in the game are common hotspots for these ideas, such as the pyramids of Egypt and Mexico, Lima, Stonehenge, Atlantis, a space Cadillac with an alien Elvis and the Face on Mars. Lead designer and programmer David Fox, consulted with New Age writer David Spangler, before Ron Gilbert and Matthew Alan Kane persuaded Fox to increase the humorous aspects of the game.
All versions of Zak except the FM-Towns port require the player to enter copy protection codes (called "exit visa codes" inside the game) whenever they fly outside of the United States. The codes were printed in black on a dark brown paper sheet included in the game package; this made photocopying them very hard to impossible. They consisted of Commodore 64 graphics characters, making it difficult for would-be software pirates to include a text file listing them with a pirate copy. The codes do not have to be entered when flying into the US, or when the player is at an airport in another country. If the player enters the wrong codes five times, Zak gets locked in jail and his guard makes a lengthy anti-piracy speech. Nonetheless, pirated versions of the game quickly popped up anyway, in which the player may enter any code.
While copy protection codes were left out of the Commodore 64 version of Maniac Mansion for lack of disk space, the developers solved this problem on Zak McKracken by putting the game engine on a separate start-up floppy. This freed enough space to include the codes on the main disk. The Commodore version of Zak McKracken did not have CBM DOS files (only raw data), but was not protected and could be backed up.
Read more about this topic: Zak McKracken And The Alien Mindbenders
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—John Dewey (1859–1952)