The year was 1996ish; the family computer, a Windows 3.1 pizza box with a 486 processor and CompuServe dial-up internet. In those days I would frequently monopolize it, sinking hours into whatever Apogee and Epic shareware games I could get my hands on. But since I couldn’t tie up the phone line with game downloads for too long, my dad would occasionally find something for me with his fast connection at the office, and bring it home on a good old 3.5″ floppy.

On one such occasion, I found myself the recipient of a well-worn disk with the cryptic string “ZZT 3.2″ scrawled on the label. Into the drive it went, and after a brief configuration prompt…

As you can probably tell from the above screenshot, ZZT is an ANSI-graphics top-down action-adventure-puzzle game. It was created in 1991 by Tim Sweeney, founder of Epic Games (then called Epic MegaGames), who went on to develop several notable shareware classics of the DOS era and became a key developer of the Unreal engine.

The registered version of ZZT came with four “worlds”, each a self-contained game that could be completed in a few hours. While these worlds remain iconic even today, and did much to establish the basic formula for “classic” ZZT gameplay, they are not the reason ZZT is so interesting.

Notice the Board Editor option in the screen above? If you haven’t guessed already, ZZT is in fact a complete game creation system. Using a wide variety of items, obstacles, and enemies, you can construct your own game worlds (stored in a “.zzt” file) and share them with others. You’re not limited to the built-in entities, either: ZZT has special generic entities called Objects that can take on any appearance, whose behavior is determined by a program written in ZZT-OOP, the “Object”-Oriented Programming language.

ZZT-OOP is a weird, restrictive little language. Among its oddities:

• You can’t create new objects at runtime; all the objects you want to use must already exist before the game starts (with one extremely limited exception)
• There are no methods, functions, or anything else that would imply a call stack
• The only flow control mechanism is “messages”, which are the equivalent of GOTO statements… except that code in one object can send a message to another object, causing that object to unconditionally jump to a different point in its program
• There are no statement blocks; the “if” command (which is the only method of conditional flow control) jumps to a specified program location if the condition is true, and falls through to the next statement if it’s false
• The only variable type is boolean, and you can’t have more than ten of them set to true at the same time
• All objects on a “board” (game screen) execute their code simultaneously, but objects on other boards cannot be accessed, since a board’s state is frozen when the player leaves it

With this being the first programming language I learned, and QuickBASIC being the second, it’s a miracle I ever managed to wrap my brain around modern languages at all. But the truth is, ZZT showed me how much fun programming could be, by setting it in the context of a game. Type in some cryptic codes, press a key, and there’s a little smiley face running around trying to shoot you. Even the tiniest amount of effort yields instant results. This appealed to my ten-year-old attention span, and though I never finished any worlds of my own, ZZT permanently lodged a favorable impression of programming in the back of my brain.

Needless to say, I wasn’t the only ZZT fan out there. Since the game’s 1991 release, aspiring game creators have cooked up thousands of ZZT worlds, each one pushing the limits of the engine further than before. Glitches were discovered that, if properly exploited, allowed one to do previously impossible things, like making an object move diagonally or teleporting the player to an arbitrary location. The world file format was reverse-engineered and new editors were created, far surpassing the game’s built-in editor. Ingenious coders transformed ZZT from a top-down action-adventure game into a sidescroller, an RPG, a stealth game, and many other genres.

As complex as some of the community’s later works were, I’d say the reason ZZT was so successful and long-lived was its simplicity. The simplicity of the text-mode graphics and PC speaker sound effects precluded the possibility of a lengthy media creation process. The extreme simplicity of the scripting language, and the existence of a pre-built engine with a lot of basic functionality included, meant that it was easy to ignore the gritty details of making a game and focus on the actual gameplay. All of these things might seem like severe limitations (they are), but they also dramatically lower the barrier to entry for new world builders.

Relatively few games today are based on user-generated content to the extent that ZZT was, and even fewer have built-in scripting languages. In a 2007 interview, Tim Sweeney himself had these words to offer:

Tim Sweeney said:

I’ve always wanted to build a massive-multiplayer version of ZZT. In other words, a vast interlinked game world built and extended by users using simple ZZT-like tools. Like ZZT, it would be open-ended and community-driven. Players would be able to build their own levels and write scripts for objects, as well as play the game as a character, build up attributes and collect items.

Such a project would tackle all the key technical problems of MMO development without the complexity of a 3D environment. The data required for levels and motion data is also so simple that servers could be run by the community without significant bandwidth expense.

Alas, such a game wouldn’t be much of a Gears of War killer. So don’t expect it to actually happen. But it would be interesting!

Indeed it would, Tim. Indeed it would.

Some links for you:
Z2 is the largest archive of worlds and other ZZT-related downloads on the internet, though much of its textual content is outdated. Be sure to check the Featured Games list, which includes a lot of famous and influential games in ZZT’s history. DOSBox comes in handy for running ZZT on modern machines (>=10,000 cycles recommended). You might also want to check out ZZT’s vastly-more-powerful-but-also-more-complex spiritual successor, MegaZeux, which is still developed today.

But sometimes you go back, take a second look at something you enjoyed as a kid, and think “Wow, this is exactly as awesome as I remembered it.” Usually that’s the point where you proceed to blow an entire evening on YouTube, DOSBox, or a console emulator, up to your eyeballs in nostalgia and grinning like you just won the lottery.

One recent “revisiting” of mine occurred when, searching for something unrelated, I discovered a playlist of probably-illegal The Magic School Bus episodes on YouTube (“Related videos” can turn up the weirdest things…). In my days as a young, impressionable elementary-schooler, I think this was one of the only ”educational” TV shows* that I would go out of my way to watch at home, because it was that good. But what with me being a grown-up college student nowadays, I hadn’t seen an episode in years.

In case there was any doubt: Yes, it’s still awesome. Coming from an adult perspective the science may seem boring due to its extremely basic nature, but it’s easy to see just how much effort went into making The Magic School Bus a fundamentally good show. Ms. Frizzle (a.k.a. Lily Tomlin) is positively effervescent, her class’s goofy antics and exaggerated reactions will appeal to anyone’s inner fourth-grader, and the show’s theme song is so damn catchy it ought to be illegal. Plus it’s hilarious to point out all the patent absurdities and flagrant violations of school health and safety protocols you never noticed as a kid.

So go out there and find something you thought was amazing when you were little, and see if it stands the test of time. At worst, you’ll laugh at yourself for ever liking it. At best, you’ll have a cake-eating grin plastered on your face for the next few hours.

* I think the only other one would have to be Bill Nye the Science Guy, who coincidentally was the SG Horton Distinguished Speaker at RIT this past fall quarter. If you ever get the opportunity to go see this guy, jump at it. He’s every bit as funny and engaging in real life as he is on the show.