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ZZT Games and Game Reviews
ZZT is an MS-DOS game created by the famous Tim Sweeney back in 1991. ZZT is mostly known not for its multi-episode base game, but for the extremely prolific catalogue of games that were created by a community of fans, mostly during the 90s and early 2000s. While limited by its very basic ANSI graphics, ZZT contains a built-in world editor to allow the player to create their own custom games. The ease of use and impressive level of customisation has allowed for the creation of many very creative and incredible games over the years.
Below you can read reviews of various excellent historical ZZT games, as well as download a few of my own games that I've created and still find worthy enough to put online. If you want to download ZZT and look through the main archive of fan-made worlds that exist for it, you can find all of that at
ZZT.org. If you find ZZT interesting, please make sure to check
the Dock (links page) for links to
some of the best ZZT fansites still standing as of this writing.
ZZT Group Project
I am excited to formally announce a group project that my good friend Mr. Sillysticks (no personal website) has proposed and that I am helping him organise. A sort of resurrection of the classic ZZTV series of games for the venerable ZZT game engine. The finalised name for the project is pending because I don't want to step on the toes of anyone who may have put together a new ZZTV after z2 stopped cataloguing releases, and am thinking of a brand new name. For now, it is to be called ZZTcast (pun on
Owncast) until I or someone else comes up with a better name. Once the name is finalised, the project will have its own, permanent page.
ZZTV is a
ZZT "magazine" that ran from 1998 to 2005, which consisted of a hub of "channels" created by various people with whatever content they wished to put out to the word. Rants/articles, stories, interviews, quotes, pixel artwork, mini-games, reviews of other ZZT games, and so on and so forth. Essentially a neat little time capsule and also an opportunity to create something cool in ZZT even if you don't have the time, energy, or motivation for a full-fledged game.
An obscure 1991 DOS game engine can seem like an odd medium to start a group project around in this day and age, but ZZT is a deceptively perfect choice for such an endeavour for a number of reasons that are not immediately clear.
The first thing that needs to be mentioned is that ZZT has an exquisitely tiny learning curve for what it allows to do. Its level editor and (bare bones) scripting language can be fully learned by anyone in no time at all, yet it has been used to create genuinely beautiful artwork, riveting RPG adventures, randomly generated dungeons, and so much more. In addition to its microscopic learning curve and powerful capabilities, every ZZT game is open source, so if you spot something incredible in a game that you have no idea how to replicate, you can simply open it up in the editor and see exactly how it works. Some ZZT games are "locked" but this is very trivial to break with
an unlocker program.
While the ZZT community has been moribund for quite a while, this is more of a reflection on the consequences of the unpleasant state of affairs in the community in the early 2000s than a reflection on the game, which had dozens of timeless games produced for it before all the strife sealed its fanbase's fate. While it's not much, ZZT does have a following
to this very day and is well deserving of a new renaissance.
Most importantly, of course, creating things in ZZT is just plain fun, which is the main reason I still make the occasional game using it in spite of everything. I also never really saw age as a reason to not use something. IRC is 35 years old and obscure compared to most of its competitors, yet is still the only chat standard that is worth using, after all.
On top of all of this it's also worth mentioning that ZZT is a DOS game, and thus will run perfectly on just about any system with an emulator such as DOSBox (or natively in old Windows).
If you are interested, you can visit
the #zzt IRC channel on
irc.koshka.love, or
E-mail me to sign-up. If you need
any help at all getting ZZT running or doing anything in ZZT, I would be delighted to assist via either IRC or E-mail also.
ZZT Game Reviews
If you are interested in playing some top-notch ZZT games from decades past, I am steadily adding reviews to them on
this page. The latest update was on 14 March 2022.
My ZZT Games
I have a long catalogue of ZZT games that I've made, dating back to 2003, but since most of them are objectively awful and cringey (quite a few date back to when I was 11-12 years old and the vast majority come from before I even turned 20) I am not going to include them here.
Santa's Advocate - A lengthy psychedelic Christmasy game in the style of Viovis, where you aid Santa Claus in a battle against his would-be usurper: ...the Krampus! Featuring a very diverse art style inspired by both Viovis, and a number of other legendary ZZTers, Santa's Advocate is a comedic adventure through a surreal world where just about anything can happen. Highly recommended to anyone with a taste of psychedelic comedy or Christmas games in general. Released on 25 December 2021.
Here's a preview screenshot, and
here is a screenshot of the title screen.
Santa's Lil' Helper - A Christmasy game I made in back in early 2014, when I still went under the moniker "CatouttaHell". Like many of my other games, this one is done in the unique style of the legendary ZZTer Viovis and is very abstract and random. Be warned that this game utilises some weird, unique effects that allow objects to clip out of the game world and it WILL cause the game to either crash or lock up at the end screen. It also breaks the status bar thingy on the right of the screen, so you'll want to restart ZZT if you plan to play anything else after playing this.
Here's a screenshot of one of the boards from this game, which I used my Windows 98 PC to create for maximum nostalgia.
As of 23 December 2021, this link should finally be working (again?)!
Finding Frankbutt - An unfinished game that I was working on back in 2014-2015-ish. It was meant to be a grand Viovisian adventure in the spirit of PPDV2. It was inspired by an IRC spambot with the odd name "frankbutt," but I never got around to finishing it and at this point I'm no longer even sure where I was going with it. I'm probably never going to finish it, but I do like what I made so far, so I'm putting it up here as it is for the hell of it. There are a few weird parts (notably the player character's name being "fillthisinlater" and a few of the boards being completely empty or unfinished) that are artefacts of me dropping this mid-development.
I have three more ZZT games that I am very slowly pecking away at, that I am not sure I will ever actually get anywhere with, so I don't want to go into detail about any of them yet. Perhaps one day this page will be updated once more...
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