ZZT FOREVER! SUBMIT GAMES ALL WEEK!

Where did you get your start in game-making? Myself, I started with QBASIC, but first publicly released them to the world with ZZT back in 1997, when I called myself "Newt." I myself haven't made a game in ZZT in over nine years.

I know some other 'wreckers used to play around with ZZT or were even involved in "the commune" back in the day. We've long had ZZT listed in our list of game creation tools for Glorious Trainwrecks events. Now let's use it!

What is ZZT? ZZT for MS-DOS is truly outrageous! It comes from 1991 by way of Time Sweeney and his Epic Mega Games, these days known simply as Epic Games (they have put away childish things, like "Mega"), studio behind Gears of War. With its built-in world editor, you can make your own ZZT world files and distribute them to people on the Internet! The game displays everything in 16 colors of 255 ASCII characters.

What can you make in ZZT? Lots of things! The worlds packaged with the game have a sort of overhead adventure-action orientation. There are many built-in objects and terrain types that complement this type of game. On the other hand, there's all kinds of "engine games" that do things you might not expect ZZT to be able to do! Side-scrollers! DOOM clones! Lemmings-likes (my personal favorites to make)!

What about this event? Back in the day, the ZZT IRC channels would put on spontaneous "Blitzkrieg ZZT" (or bkZZT), very much like our own KotMK events, jamming out a game in an hour or less. Bigger, more official events (containing all the community drama of the IGF!) were called things like "Weekend of ZZT" and "24 Hours of ZZT," with judges and the goal of creating a fairly polished ZZT world.

I want to capture the spirit of all of that. So you have a weekend to produce one or as many games as you want! There's no judging involved, though. So make one long adventure game or twenty little shooty action challenges or a pair of visual novels or whatever you like! Put all of the community's games together and we'll have our very own Pirate Disk of choice twenty-first century ZZT worlds.

Where do I get ZZT/learn how to make ZZT stuff? Z2 is the definitive existing resource on ZZT.

• Download ZZT here. ZZT 3.2 is the standard, though my friend WiL's 4.0 is pretty neat.
• Here's some useful help files that will clarify some things about how ZZT-OOP (ZZT's programming language) works, what tools to use (Janson's Super-Tool-Kit (STK) is a must), and any compatability issues.

So there we have it! Let's ZZT!

THIS EVENT IS ON!

Submit your games with this form!

Also, I am going to officially encourage you to submit games all through this week, if you so choose!