ZZT
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Has this been suggested yet? I know, it looks like ass but despite its limitations it garnered quite a community over the years. Also, it can be seen as the proto-Unreal engine, or proto-Mario Maker as the best thing about it is that you can code up little scripts for its objects and make pretty elaborate maps; even today it’s not dead.
Who knows if it’s fun to play and create stuff but might be worth a shot.
This is a game I love. I have such great memories of my dad bringing it home. Exploring it. Discovering a built in editor. Inviting friends over to build levels. Writing in to Epic and getting some free swag. Great stuff!
I actually know the person who first hexedited the ZZT executable to allow the use of more colours. (She is mentioned in the DavidXNewton video on the topic. Could ask her if she wants to comment on what ZZT was like back in the day if we ever do this.
Logged on this morning to suggest ZZT, but also very glad to see that someone beat me to it 🙂
So I shall add my voice to the bunch, and suggest we get around to play ZZT at some point. It is both of historical interest, as it is developped by Tim Sweeney the now head honcho of Epic Games, but also by the fact that the game still have a vivid community, despite or thanks to how minimalist it is. It is fascinating to see how people are pushing the engine and coming with super weird stuff.
What more, it’s also super accessible ! A lot of the mods are just one click away on https://museumofzzt.com/ , and also archive.org https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos_zzt . Most adventures are fairly short, but Museum of ZZT actually support saving games online !
It’s a game I’m kinda surprised to just have eluded me for ages until I’ve seen the MeansTV Preserving Worlds episode on it. As someone who was very much tracing DOS gaming history in the early 2000s, realising I never noticed it was a bit shocking, given the size of the community it had.
This was the first game I thought to suggest as well, it was all over the place back in the day and being the game that launched Epic Mega Games it’s an interesting thing. I didn’t have an internet connection until later so didn’t know about the creative scene until much too late but we … borrowed … a disk from one of my Dad’s more tech savvy friends that had a few worlds on it and boy did we play the heck out of that.
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