This evening I decided to check the U.S. Trademark filings for pinball for the first time in a while and Boom 💥 we got something.
Two new trademarks were filed this week for "Magic Girl" and "Retro Atomic Zombie Adventureland" (RAZA) 😮. When I saw that my jaw dropped. I thought to myself, Again?!
So who filed the trademarks? A gentleman in the Netherlands named Melvin Williams, who just so happens to be the head of Dutch Pinball's new luxury brand Dutch Pinball Exclusive (DPX).
Last week, Dutch Pinball unveiled this new brand. According to Kaneda's Pinball Podcast, DPX's first game will be Alice in Wonderland, based on an undeveloped game that was developed by John Popadiuk (JPop) while he was at Zidware, featuring amazing art by Zombie Yeti.
Apparently, DPX is at least considering manufacturing two other Zidware games, Magic Girl and RAZA. The two machines have a long and twisted history. Their initial designer, John Popadiuk and Zidware were never able to bring them to market. A number of people who pre-ordered Magic Girl from Zidware ended up losing money.
Flash forward several years and Popadiuk resurfaced at the fledgling American Pinball (AP) with an agreement to help them design Houdini in exchange for building the remaining Magic Girl games that he owed customers. While several Magic Girls were produced at AP, they never worked properly, JPop's version of Houdini was essentially vaporware and AP cut ties with him.
The saga doesn't end there. A little while after the AP debacle, JPop surfaced once again at a new company called Deeproot Pinball. Deeproot ended up being an even bigger mess with its founder, Robert Mueller misappropriating money from investors in his funds to use at the pinball Company...which was so poorly run that it never even brought a single game to market.
Deeproot's most developed game, which was supposed to be its first to be released, was none other than Retro Atomic Zombie Adventureland. A few RAZAs were built. Some of them were sold in the Deeproot bankruptcy auction and one or two of them were said to have just disappeared.
Whew. So that's the long story of Magic Girl and RAZA. It appears as though DPX has filed Trademarks for them. Will we see yet another attempt to bring them to market? Time will tell.
One of the AP Magic Girls that was fixed by a group of people in the Netherlands, as seen at Past Time Arcade in Girard, Ohio:
Pictures of Retro Atomic Zombie Adventureland from when Deeproot was working on it:
