The Nightly Stats
Hey good news, for the first time ever, the little nightly stats scraping script made specifically for these articles was able to go an entire year without issue. Not a single gap!
Queue Size By Date
I think this year's chart doesn't look half bad, though truth be told last year's ended up being smoother. 2023 managed to avoid the dreaded "page 2" of uploads for almost the entire year, only really charting above it in April which was at least due to a conscious decision. You see, Publication Pack Vol. 68 came out in March, and the opportunity to make PP69 come out on 4/20 was impossible to resist, with me pulling in folks who wanted to get something they were finishing up out in time for the funny numbers. Focusing on the new meant letting the old sit and pile up as new streams of unpreserved worlds continued.
So I think I have a good excuse at least.
The only other time the second page was hit was at the end of the year for a moment so brief that the script never even actually saw it. When I played myself by letting the queue reach the threshold, having a pack ready to go that just needed to be spellchecked and have its contents actually published, and then realized that I had to first do a Sunday stream which meant uploading more games! Awful.
Where I didn't do as good of a job was in ever actually emptying the queue, something only managed in mid-October in preparation for Oktrollberfest uploads which could very well have been another second page scenario. Maybe that'll be my resolution for 2024.
Number Go Up
I think all of these can just go together here. Other nightly captures include how many unique files, authors, and companies are known in the Museum's database. As more worlds are discovered/created, this number can pretty much only go up, and it can be neat to see how far up they go over the course of a year. More than fifty authors were added this year! That's a lot of ZZTers whose works were previously unknown.
In a prefect world, it should be impossible for these counts to ever go down at all, but that's not the case. Removed worlds, whether from author request or just realizing something is in fact a duplicate that went unnoticed can decrease file counts. Companies can get minor inconsistencies where one game may say it was made under "Damage Inc." and other another "Damage Incorporated". If the name isn't familiar enough on upload/publication to be noticed, you sometimes run into the same group showing up twice and eventually being merged together. The same applies to authors, whom also have the added complexities of ever-changing aliases. I can remember at some point in the last year realizing we had a "Pat" and "Patrick" name that was the same person all along that wound up being combined.
For reference, the Museum had something like 2,300 files hosted at launch. (I use Ana as my cutoff, as it was uploaded to z2, but never published-published until the Museum.) Between then and now, that's more than 1,500 files since! Not enough to lazily say it doubled, but enough that if sources don't dry up (a big if), then it won't be all that long until it actually does. It's wild to think that the Museum was founded on the idea that most ZZT games were already preserved, or would never be seen again. Sometimes it's good to be wrong.
Museum of ZZT: Unlocked
There's a whole bunch of stuff I would love to also talk about, taking advantage of the closing of a year to talk endlessly about what got done this year, what cool games were discovered, what surprising moments were had, and I absolutely do not have the time because I did not plan this very well!
What I would like to do though, is share a handful of games that I played in 2023 that resonated with me. These are just some of the worlds of ZZT that I won't be forgetting anytime soon:
*Immediately starts with a game that I actually played in 2022.*
Listen, I made my list by looking at everything that got streamed or a Closer Look published in 2023. If you actually go by what I remember, my goldfish-like memory will tell you I played Galactic Foodtruck Simulator and uhh I don't know maybe Nightmare.
Oil saw dave2 returning the community after a lengthy absence. And he made darned sure that his return would be something memorable by returning to an incomplete 24 Hours of ZZT entry, and rebuilding it into an excellent modern ZZT world. I loved everything about Oil. Its refreshingly unique setting of a mermaid colony deep beneath the ocean. Its tiny hints into the world of man, in their endless search for a strange undersea mineral known as redscale. Its clever handling of health by having slowly regenerating vegetation to sample. Its tense atmosphere as your try to stop an oil spill from rendering your colony uninhabitable. Innovative puzzles, a sense of humor, enemies that felt different from the usual ZZT baddies. All of this while running on a timer forcing you to always keep moving, and making every botched puzzle attempt sting that much more.
For the ultimate case of whiplash, look no further than Tony Rivera's Adventure series. What began as a challenge to myself to finally beat a game I enjoyed but just could not get anywhere in as a kid, turned into one of the most incredible journeys a classic ZZT adventure has even taken me on. The game is disgustingly cruel to players from the very beginning, starving them of every resource, then asking them to spend their money perfectly on exactly the weapon needed the moment it can be of use. The slightest mis-step can send your save into the garbage. There are some games you struggle with as a child only to realize that the problem wasn't you, it was the game itself.
Adventure quickly turned into something I loathed. Any charm found in its characters and fantasy setting just entirely overshadowed by the misery inflicted in the game's first dungeon. It was a Dan Shootwrong situation. And then I finally got through that starting dungeon ...and the game got good. Like. Really good.
I've never been more confused in my life. Why would the author suddenly decide to be kind to the player? And it kept going. The game did still have its issues, but more typical of ZZT worlds of the early to mid 90s, a few gotchas that make sense in hindsight, but add nothing worthwhile to include. The second game then managed to be more impressive, offering two different paths to help you get through the game, proving your worth and then relying on your new reputation elsewhere to avoid a different proof of worth type quest. It made the world feel large and open to explore. A real gem of a non-linear ZZT world, which at the last minute tries (a bit too clumsily) to introduce an ally for the player. It's incredibly ambitious, doesn't quite succeed, and at yet at the start of that first game I wanted nothing more than to give up and never think about the series again.
Featured Reviews
While I had a very tough time figuring out how to write about this one, I do think WiL's 2001 cinematic RPG Voyage of Four is really a remarkable little game. Having somehow not bothered with it back when it was new (though I think I would have been too young to appreciate it), I only managed to play it this year.
So many ZZTers in their teens promised games that would tell epic tales of grand characters, setting a new standard for storytelling in ZZT. Yet each one seems to have succumbed in one way or another, failing to deliver on their promise. Some were never finished, some never knew when to quit, and some wound up simply not being all that great in the story department to begin with.
WiL's story here though, is by far the closest to fulfilling the promise. It's so clear that he's reaching for the stars here. Several strangers, each struggling ("what they knew no longer is, what they want is within their grasp") in their own way, meeting one another, and changing the course of history. Plus a little bit of inter-dimensional travel thrown in for good measure. It's a very wordy game, with a clever RPG engine used throughout, plus a handful of boards where player choices can nudge the direction of the game down a few paths. The characters work, coming off as people with flaws and motivations, and by golly you can actually see how they grow from start to finish.
For a ZZT game from 2001, this one really is one of the best stories I've seen told. Despite the immense confusion in the second file, as well as a few weird bugs that I was inconsistently running into. I'm mad that I didn't get in on this on the ground floor, as it would have absolutely influenced me to start and then not finish a few epics of my own as a teenager.
Featured Reviews
Coolzx's Last Momentum was simply a pleasant surprise. Another game I could have been playing when I was young that I managed to miss despite the Game of the Month Award bestowed upon it. An arcade racer for ZZT with a few inspired ideas that move it ahead of the pack with a rarely seen style of gameplay. "Momentum Speed-Racing" is the sport of the future, and your job is to drive as fast and far as you can without crashing into an endless array of obstacles littering the course.
Each crash drains your payout and slows you down. Slow down too much and it's game over. So you need to make good use of your onboard computer to purchase items mid-race to boost your speed once more.
The gameplay is rather simple, but it really clicked with me. I had a ton of fun getting through all the courses, seeing how coolzx slowly turned up the difficultly so effectively, and felt that a few tiny tweaks would have made this one a rare instance of a ZZT game where you could really play skillfully and compete with others for a high score.
Plus your character's name is Trent Carwell. The story is wonderfully silly.
Walter's Quest was a game that I immediately wanted to stream after playing for a Closer Look. It's another example of a ZZT world that manages to succeed where others failed. ZZT has loads of globe-trotting adventures and treasure hunting games. The earliest are usually very simple games with gameplay you'd expect from Town and other early worlds. Later ones tended to go for dungeon-crawling as inspiration for gameplay. Walter's Quest feels like a blend of both, sending players into exotic locations, with more story than just "grab the gold". It feels so much like a summer blockbuster adventure movie, without aping anything like Indiana Jones.
The story really ties everything together, with Walter always one step behind as he tries to save the world from a cult determined to bring Anubis back to the land of the living to reign supreme. The execution here is just so well done, with never a dull moment, and some unexpected settings for stages that really help to make the game memorable.
Except the vampires in France. Those vampires are the difference between "Oh this is one of the best ZZT adventures I've ever seen" and "Oh this rules. Shame about THE VAMPIRES IN FRANCE."
I would be remiss to not talk about the big find for 2023. That is, asie, after having painstakingly recreated ZZT's long lost source code with The Reconstruction of ZZT, continued to dig around with some leads from the Softdisk published variant, Worlds of ZZT. While Tim's copy of ZZT's source code was accidentally lost forever ago, a surviving copy of the Softdisk variant was actually uncovered!
There are a few tweaks here and there, hence the "Almost", but this release meant seeing original variable and function names, plus any comments!
Thanks to the Reconstruction, the impact this had on the scene ended up being pretty minimal, and the comments aren't all that revelatory. There really wasn't much in the name of hints at scrapped features or elements, or any other juicy material folks might have dreamed of. No hints at Super ZZT's weird do-nothing Dragon Pups and Pairers. No explanation for what PHYSICS.ZZT in ZZT v2.0 was going to be. Mostly, we got to learn the far more generic internal names used for creatures.
This is the stuff everyone was dreaming of finding in the 90s though. And now here it is. Actual ZZT source code.
As far as ZZTers whose works were unintentionally memory-holed, Graham Peet is among one of the finest to have been recovered. Despite posting a collection of his old ZZT games on the DigitalMZX forums, nobody in either community apparently bothered to put them somewhere a little more easily reached. Luckily, DMZX has no intention of vanishing and so those files were able to be added to the Museum. Slowly added that is. There are still more.
But his games have been very creative, very big, and very well made. GemHunt is a pseudo-platformer where players are locked by walls into staying on the ground, using all kind of devices to perform vertical leaps when necessary. Darren Hewer's own 2019 Platformer without an engine, Daedalus' Obelisk was praised for making something as unlikely as using the actual ZZT player as a platforming protagonist so effectively. Here, Graham Peet had already done so more than twenty years prior! And with no recognition.
GemHunt is a wonderful exploratory platformer with a series of levels and a goal of reaching the end with all of the gems you can amass. It has that cheerful atmosphere found in early ZZT worlds that by the late 90s had fallen out of favor, another way the game is a bit of an outlier. Playing it on stream all of us were constantly surprised at the brilliant ways the stages were presented to players, how gems were hidden basically everywhere, and just how polished of a game it was for the 90s.
If you're reading this article, surely you're well aware of Code Red, the massive ZZT game by Alexis Janson that seemingly outdid all of her peers in scope, complexity, and just how many darn endings the thing has. The game has been considered a must-play for ZZTers since its release, and pioneered the "wake up and save the world" adventure. It's surely one of the most played ZZT worlds out there, and I sat down last year and slowly made my way through every single one of the game's many paths to finally experience it in full, as well as to see how much the game still shined 30 years later.
Well, as it turned out, Code Red ain't quite what it's cracked up to be. It is an incredibly important world, but playing the entire thing rather than just chipping away at an ending or two reveals that it's hardly without problems. Easily missable items in the opening boards can render several paths unplayable. A handful of bugs that all but guarantee it in a few paths (which may or may not be fixed depending on which release you play). A few rather obtuse moments, and pretty much every ending boils down to going onto another alien starbase orbiting the Earth and blowing it up before they do the same to the planet.
Its legacy is too strong to suggest anyone stay away from it, and its impact on ZZT culture as a whole makes it arguably Janson's most important ZZT release, easily on par with Super Tool Kit and Mission: Enigma. It's just very much a game of its time, that I'm glad I've completed, but am in no hurry to do so again.
Never playing Code Red would still be a mistake, and a much graver one than playing every last ending.
And for a closer, in terms of white whales for ZZT (games) being recovered, Commodore's Space Fork absolutely ticks that particular box. I've repeated this story too often now, blah blah blah somehow not a single ZZT world dated 2011 was preserved. Until just a few short months ago, when one by Commodore was found.
It's also quite an impressive one. Commodore's ZZT prowess has always been some of the most impressive around. Look no further than Psychic Solar War Adventure to see what I mean, with its level system, re-usable RPG combat engine, and survival mechanics. Space Fork was to continue on in that vein of making the impossible in ZZT possible, creating a galaxy to explore, missions to complete, and pirates to shoot down. The game, even in its incomplete state, featured what can best be described as Super Star Trek in ZZT form.
There's not much story that develops over what little is there, and more than a few boards have passages that boot the player to the title screen, yet the core ship to ship combat engine is complete enough that you can tell Commodore was once again onto something truly special.
The 2024 Prediction
The previous stats article ended suggesting it would be cool for a 2011 world to be found in 2023, and that shot got called! So, I'm going to assume that what I decree here happens, and will shoot a similar longshot for 2024. Putting all my mental powers into this year being the the year we find the original release of Sivion as of now.
