Presented in Retrovision: ZZT
Change is always bound to happen. Time chugs along and as far as the video game world is concerned, the games I grew up with are almost paleolithic and obsolete. PC gaming has become a multi-billion dollar industry, filled with large corporations. Times of my youth were filled with single person teams, creating homebrew shareware. These people are now some of the major pioneers in the video game industry. Today, I'm going to talk about one of the most influential games of my childhood. The game wasn't particularly good, but it truly molded my professional career at a very young age. This game is Tim Sweeney's ZZT.
Around 1993, my father had brought home our first modem. This new addition to our world was a screaming 14.4k US Robotics internal ISA modem. I remember asking, "Dad, what is this thing?" He explained to me that it was a lovely little device that allowed our 16Mhz 386SX Wang Microcomputer to talk to other computers around the world over the phone lines. He had also brought home a list of things called Bulletin Board Systems (BBS). For the uninitiated, BBSs were sort of like the Internet, only on a much smaller scale. My father dialed up a local system and gave me a tour. He showed me how I would be able to send mail to other friends over a system called FidoNet (A pre-internet distributed mail system), chat with locals also connected to the same BBS, read news posts, and download files from the BBS' file archive. He let me browse through the list, categorically and systematically combing through the 'Games' category. I was overwhelmed with the sheer number of downloadable titles available to me. I picked out a couple random Apogee titles like Duke Nukem and Commander Keen, and my father showed me how to use ZModem, Kermit, and eventually PKZip. This was a stretch considering that, at the time, most everything was driven by a command prompt.
After my brief introduction to BBSs, I became rapidly accustomed to downloading shareware titles. It was almost second nature for me to religiously comb the archives for new and interesting titles, which rapidly filled up my 40MB hard drive. After a few weeks of watching and befriending locals on the chat system, I discovered a title near the bottom of the list. This game was called ZZT, and was created by developer Tim Sweeney. Initially, the game seemed very similar to the game Kingdom of Kroz, which was an unassuming adventure game where players could crawl around in a dungeon fighting monsters. The graphics were simplistic and driven by a simple text terminal video mode. I controlled my white on dark blue smiley through various single screen maps, firing ANSI encoded bullets pace at Pis (Tigers), Clubs (Ruffians) and Omegas (Lions). Ultimately, the game itself did not hold my interest for very long. The game was rather slow and clunky, and the difficulty curve left something to be desired. It rapidly jumped from mind-numbingly easy to excruciating and frustrating. I probably would have moved on and never thought another thing of it, until I noticed the Editor function on the main screen.
After pressing "E", I was greeted with a flashing white cross, a black box with a yellow border and a series of various object classes and file operations. I quickly discovered that I could create my own world for ZZT, which much like the bionic man, could be better, faster and stronger than the levels that came with the system. My childhood ambition clouded my ability to judge my own design talent. I began work on my own world, comically bad in hindsight. My player was given a pool equipped with a fake wall diving board, a palm tree approximately three times the size of his kindergarten-perspective shanty house, a patio littered with ammo, and a menagerie of other, various things bent on his destruction. I would eventually expand this world out, adding several new maps, and an interior to the house as well as a few rapidly disappearing, flashing scrolls. These scrolls were intended to inform anyone playing my game of the back story, play controls and what have you. Honestly, my board was quite terrible, having consisted of all pre-built objects an no discernible goals. Yet, I was proud of my accomplishment from being a 12 year old game designer and new BBS aficionado to boot.
After a short while, I decided to take on the game's more daunting feature: Objects. Objects were these handy programmable entities, which would follow my every command. These objects allowed me to create all sorts of evil things, a beach towel that would shoot ninja stars at my poor player, the ability to animate my swimming pool (which was now filled with deadly sharks), and the resources to talk to the end player so as to help establish an RPG like dialog. I just could not get enough of this game. I spent the greater part of a year playing, which only reinforced my desire to become a game designer later in life. I religiously created worlds and uploaded them to the local BBSs in hopes that someone might play my game and enjoy it. I never did find out if anyone liked my games, but they were available, and that was good enough for me.
My fascination with the editor also increased my desire to seek out others who had developed for this poor, under-appreciated game. I would eventually find the words of a man named Gregory Janson. He has good number of the best ZZT games of all time. Titles like Code Red, a multi-ending adventure game featuring space travel and brain-sucking alien neighbors, and Mission: Enigma, a short but very challenging game with everything from agility tests, problem solving, an RPG boss fight and a little cinematic humor to boot. Both of these titles are well worth the download, even today. Amazingly enough, they are still available today, and receive quite a bit of praise from both long-term ZZT fans and those new to the fold.
One thing I've been seemingly neglecting to mention is the fact that this game was created by Epic Megagames (now just Epic Games). The very same man, Tim Sweeney, responsible for such games as Unreal and Gears of War, had come from some very humble beginnings. ZZT was originally created in 1991, and the first game created by this student of Mechanical Engineering. Tim would eventually use the money he earned from ZZT to create a less successful sequel ,Super ZZT, and one of the first VGA side-scrolling platform games for the PC, Jill of the Jungle. Jill of the Jungle would further inspire Tim to create several other titles, and eventually these games launched him, and his company, into the super power that it is today. The Unreal Engine is now one of the most widely used 3D engines available to date, which is a far stretch from his humble, text-mode beginnings.
While ZZT isn't exactly the pinnacle of game history, it inspired myself and possibly several other people to become programmers. It helped to create the idea of a fully customizable game engine, which, at that time, was a feature that was a rarity. It is truly a tribute to a time when a single man could really change the gaming world single-handed, with no money, help or even any real experience. Tim Sweeney's ZZT is truly a testament to what can happen when someone has a little vision, a little knowledge, and a lot luck.
Asterick
Posted to Hot Stuff, Video Games on 29 November 2007
· Comments (6)
Other stuff like this: epic megagames, retrovision, tim sweeney, zzt
Wow...I don't remember that, but I remember all that other stuff...Commander Keen, ZModem, PKZip etc. I also downloaded my first porn pictures and stories from some BBS down south :) :) (Straight ones first though...it was very confusing.)
Oh my god, I loved ZZT.
I got really into the world editing and object scripting. I had this sprawling, grandiose plan for a game that was basically just a hodge-podge of random ideas clumsily pasted together, but it was mine and I loved it.
I'd gotten as far as creating a couple of "bosses" – giant monsters that consisted of a bunch of separate objects that communicated with each other to give the illusion of being a single creature.
And then my computer died, I lost everything, and I installed linux. Or maybe that happened some other time, but I don't have any of my ZZT stuff anymore.
Oh man, Jill of the Jungle. I played that when I was younger. Can't remember exactly how much younger; older than six but definitely before I was nine. I've actually got the floppy over here, literally on the right-hand side of my desk, and I've been wishing it would work for quite some time. (That and my three gimp pinball floppies...) I had no idea Sweeny was responsible for that!
That made my day, and certainly gives me faith in one person's ability to progress, in -all- industries, not just the gaming industry.
I think that by '93 I already had my Jill of the Jungle level editor written (in QBasic, since I only had a PC at work and it only contained QBasic, Lotus or dBase at the time..... apart from Jill, and Commander Keen, and Ken's Labyrinth.) It was pretty rudimentary, really just a hex editor with a legend to tell me which bytes meant what elements, but I loved that kind of thing in those days.
I only played ZZT for a few minutes after downloading it, because I had played a lot of Nethack and Moria in school and wrote off ZZT as just being a color version of those. But Jill I liked almost as much as Keen, and being able to figure out the level format and write the editor may have actually given it the edge.
I got my first modem in 1983, and started my first BBS a few months later after draining the other local boards dry of their Commodore 64 software. In retrospect, I'm surprised there weren't games like ZZT for it, but most people writing for the C64 either went the text adventure route or the sprites-and-a-joystick route (though I did have this Galaga clone that played really well but was rendered entirely in text mode using PET graphics characters.)
Wow, I remember this game from one of those "1000 games on one disk" things that floated around in the 90's. I never realized it had a level editor or anything like that. I just enjoyed playing it because of all the little jokes sprinkled out in the game.
Okay, so maybe I don't belong here since last I checked, I was straight. But I represent a community that houses some gays and a variety of furries. ZZT is still alive, but it's fading from its niches into an open hole in the internet. z2 needs YOU to keep ZZT alive! There are still people making new games! Come and join us again, and find more people who remember and enjoy ZZT!
P.S. In cases where it may be the deciding factor, I am pleased to announce that ZZT is abandonware. You do not have to pay to get the "registered" version anymore.