You can create something so quickly, that it's amazing! It's so much fun to sit down and create a virtual world with objects that interact. You can get graphically creative with 3rd party addons such as KevEdit/ZZTAE/S-TOOL-K and more. It uses only a few colors and the ASCII characters for objects and graphics. Basically, it's a GCS or Game Creation System. There's no easy way to describe it to others. I have data backed up for years of other backups and you 'lost' the source code to one of the greatest BBS games in history? Over 100,000 registered ZZTers!? My biggest complaint is the fact that Tim Sweeney 'lost' the source code.

Besides that, it was created for simplistic creations. Back then, we really didn't have much in terms of power. You can create so many unique and different worlds with it. ZZT is the best of the old world of shareware from the early 1990s. It's a fun game in and of itself, and there's a huge library of free, community-made games that add to an already impressive package. ZZT was one of the first truely community driven games - I remember downloading games from AOL's media library back when AOL WAS the internet. While that doesn't take away from it's overall appeal, it will most certainly provide a barrier to entry for folks accustomed to the prettier things in life. There were plenty of pre-packaged enemies and tools, but with ZZT OOP (ZZT Object Oriented Programming), a creative user could make anything from a custom baddie to a fairly complex RPG battle system.Īs I've said, ZZT doesn't look very good.

While there were certainly limitations to what you could do with it, ZZT was a perfect starting off point for any would-be game developer. Though its simple, ASCII graphics were dated even when ZZT was released, it was such a robust tool for game creation, that it's still popular to this very day.

ZZT! for ios instal