So! You want to be a hero? Well have I got the prefect ZZT game for you then. Today we're going to be checking out Quest For Glory, a 1998 fantasy adventure by Hydra78 and MeBo of Interactive Fantasies. If you know your adventure gaming history, then you're probably familiar with Sierra's Quest for Glory series which began all the way back in 1989. Like many ZZTers throughout the years, the game's creators were fans of the existing series and wanted to try their own take on the game, adapting it to ZZT and transforming it in ways to better suit the less powerful medium.
This game adapts the story and world of the first entry in Sierra's series, but is hardly an accurate conversion. The Sierra game's unique stats system and leveling mechanics have been cut, and many puzzles have been ripped out entirely. The end result is a game with a focus on exploring Spielburg valley, meeting its people, and finding ways to earn their respect in order to become a famous hero of legend. Unlike a typical Sierra game, death is a rarity, with simple combat for smaller skirmishes and an RPG engine pulled out for more notable boss fights. It's a much more relaxed interpretation of the game which makes for a chill game to get lost in for an hour or two.
Like other ZZT adaptions of older adventure games, Quest for Glory's much later release date means that for a number of ZZTers, this was their first introduction to the games. And given how often I've brought this one up as an example in previous articles alongside Hydra's previous release King's Quest ZZT, it should be no surprise that this is a world that absolutely enamored me as a child. It was a big outdoor environment centered around an amazing looking town, with cool boss fights and just a real sense that you were on a journey as you went through it. I'm very happy to see that even knowing that the game isn't particularly original, it's still very enjoyable even now.
The Glorious Quest
Quest For Glory keeps the player practically nameless. You play as Jago Daforgo, though that name appears about three times in the game in total. You are a wandering adventure in search of... nay, questing for glory. You arrive in the town of Spielburg in hopes of making a name for yourself. Luckily, this is a land in need of your services. The mountain pass has frequently been blocked off due to snow and many angry monsters are now out wandering the previously peaceful valley. The town sheriff suggests that someone like you should head to the adventurers' guild and look for a quest or two.
While you certainly get to take down a number of nasty creatures in your stay in Spielburg, the game really revolves around two major quests. Baron von Spielburg has had some pretty rough luck, and both of children have gone missing. His daughter Elsa was abducted by a dragon rumored to have been sent from the witch Baba Yaga herself years ago. His son Bernard went out riding one day and never returned. Soldiers attempting to rescue them have turned up nothing, and those brave/foolish enough to enter the witch's hut are said to have been transformed into frogs. Needless to say, you have your work cut out for you. The woods, rivers, and mountains are your to explore. Unlike in the Sierra release, the player isn't entirely free to explore everywhere they can reach. Still, the game does a good job of creating an illusion of a more open-ended game, frequently providing forks in the road to traverse even if only one of those paths will unlock the ability to travel anywhere new.
As players work on mapping the forest for themselves and discovering the whereabouts of the lost children, there are a few other locals who can use your aid. A cry for help in the woods turns into an encounter with a forest fairy that has taken the form of a fox only to be caught by a hunter's trap. Show kindness and you'll be rewarded with useful information about where a magic mirror can be found. A healer just outside of town has lost her golden ring, offering some useful early game cash if you can find it for her. The wizard Erasmus is always up for playing games, as long as you don't touch his stuff while a guest in his home. Henry the Hermit will invite you into his cave to gamble on a simple card game. It goes on.
These characters help fill out the world and ensure that your forays into the wilderness amount to more than just swinging a sword at a goblin on every screen. These characters mimic their originals, which means a more diverse range of fantasy creatures that goes beyond humans with pointy ears or oversized beards. This is a world that features cat-people (Katta) and even centaurs performing mundane tasks while living in the town of Spielburg.
Eventually players will reach a major landmark in the form of Baba Yaga's cottage and hopefully have remembered to pick up a dispel potion at the magic shop earlier. Erasmus's magic mirror is also recommended as it offers a way to reflect her spells back at her. The potion turns some frogs back into soldiers and makes the fight with the witch something you can actually win thanks to their support, and it's a good thing too as the baron's son Bernard has been imprisoned here.
After that, you're permitted to the western passage, paying a bridge toll some gold pieces to cross a river, and then having a lovely camp-out in "Erana's Peace", a sunny glade atop a mountain. Brigands become the main threat here as you search out the location of their fortress, and they go all out to keep you away, having realized that you're rather serious about finding the baron's missing daughter as well.
Just past a graveyard, there seems to be a moment's peace with nothing more going on other than an archer practicing his shots. A nearby letter intended for some brigands reveals that the spot is soon to be used for a secret meeting where any witnesses must be removed. Weirdly, our hero is content to hide in the bushes to observe the meeting, only watching in silence as two brigands show up and quickly kill the archer with a thrown dagger. That's what they get for not being of noble blood I guess.
The meeting provides some key information on how to reach the fortress. There's a hidden tunnel in one of the graves that will lead you where you want to go, but getting through requires making sure not to be seen and getting past a hired troll guard who will only let you pass if you know the password ("Pop in je moerstall sucks!"). The time spent underground ends up being even more fraught than you might expect as you manage to break the curse on a statue revealing it to have originally been a man named Derro. Unlike everyone else, Derro is hardly grateful, and eager to resume his (unexplored) villainy by first killing you, leading to another battle, along with a rarely seen sight in the form of a ZZT cut-scene that has multiple objects moving in tandem to create stick figure characters instead of tiny smiley faces.
Once finally past the troll, you can emerge from the tunnel just outside the fortress and begin your final raid in hopes that Elsa is indeed there. The game culminates with a timed puzzle sequence where a room must be barricaded to keep reinforcements out for long enough that you can deal with the few scoundrels present and proceed to the leader's chambers, discovering their secret identity and finding a way to bring Elsa back home safely.
One charming series of cut-scenes showing your walk back home later, and it's time for a celebratory feast with you as the guest of honor for your heroics.
It's hardly the most exciting story, even for one lifted from a more "professionally" made game. The more structured way the environment is laid out means there's not really much for players to figure out for themselves. It's similar to Savage Isle or King's Quest ZZT where you just kind of get a checklist of things that need to be done before you can win and then you go do them. The linearity may even seem a step backwards compared to Savage Isle at first, until you remember that going out of order in that game often meant having to backtrack across a dozen or more screens to pick up what you missed. This game is far more self-contained, making sure you're not wasting time straying too far from the main path at any given moment.
And of course, this game isn't afraid to have combat in it, so even when you're exploring in the wrong direction, you're still being challenged by enemies, growing stronger, and amassing money to spend at the various shops found around the world.
Bumping, Swinging, And Chugging
Despite not implementing the Sierra game's class system nor any form of stats and leveling, Quest For Glory remains a game with a heavy emphasis on combat. Two forms are used, a more common bump system for basic enemies encountered in the Spielburg wilds, with a fancier RPG engine used when dealing with more important foes. The RPG engine itself has a few variants as the format is adjusted slightly depending on whether the player is fighting alone or with allies.
The bump combat still differentiates itself from other games such as Rhygar thanks to its unusual rules for engaging. The typical ZZT approach for this kind of combat relies on observing how enemies sometimes change character, and timing your strikes so they occur when this alternate character is visible. Get your timing right and your attack hits. Accidentally touch them or be bumped yourself and you take damage instead. Not how it works here.
Hydra and MeBo go for a more awkward design whose grievances are made worse by the system not being explained to players at all. By relying on the player to figure things out themselves, it's very easy to take a lot more damage than necessary, which makes health a fairly precious resource. The game does have a healing mechanic to be covered shortly, so it's not as dire as it could have been, but a little explanation could have made the combat much more involved rather than coming off as a busted guessing game.
This version of combat still has enemies swap between two characters, but it feels like Hydra got it backwards. Enemies will change character and pause in place, presenting an opportunity to strike, only for players to be harmed for attacking then. You're instead expected to move in when they're more active which makes them pretty hard to hit, especially as most enemies move randomly far more often than seeking the player. This really raises the difficulty of having the time to get in and strike before they attack via #if contact regardless of their current char. Most enemies only have a very slight window where you can safely attack without being harmed that's only as many ticks long as their object cycle.
Your own attempts to attack should be assumed to begin with being struck by your foe first. To avoid damage with any consistency, you have to play patiently to an annoying degree. Hydra and MeBo seem to recognize this and have at least made sure that most enemies die in a single attack and deal small amounts of damage. There are exceptions to be mindful of though. The lava mephits of the ice plains are a lot sturdier, while the brigands found in later parts of the game hit pretty hard. Eight damage is still less than a ruffian, but these enemies do remain a threat after attacking.
The ice plains also do feature "dwellers", the only enemy in the game that gets to shoot at players. This not only makes them the most damaging enemy, it also makes them one of the hardest to sneak past. As you never get a ranged weapon yourself, they're also immune to friendly-fire, lacking a :SHOT label that would allow them to destroy one another.
Often in these kind of games running away is the correct answer. Ignoring combat never feels fun, so Hydra entices players to engage by offering both gold and experience points for defeating enemies. A single mandatory purchase is the only time you have to spend money, allowing the rest to spent on the Spielburg inn, healing potions, and stronger weapons used in the RPG boss battles.
The inn resets your heath to 250, which doubles as the maximum as enforced by an object on every board. It's much more affordable compared to potions, at the expense of player's time due to this game's version of Spielburg being much less open-ended. Eventually a point of no return is crossed and Spielburg is left inaccessible for the remainder of the game.
Potions can be purchased in the magic shop in Spielburg as well as a number of random small shops found all over the world to spare you the hike back to town. These are tracked by your torches allowing you to buy as many as you can afford, using a menu system to drink them as needed. It can be a little confusing though as each shop sells them for a different price and claims they restore a different amount of health. In reality, the same menu object is used everywhere and they always restore 50 HP even when you consume them immediately after buying them where they were labeled as only healing 30 health. It's unclear if the authors couldn't decide on how effective they should be or perhaps if the game was originally going to use flags to track multiple varieties of potions rather than using the torch counter instead.
Given their high prices, it's very much to the players' benefit to always get the full 50 health from them.
Despite the rough edges when fighting, the system actually holds up rather well. With low damage and the ability to stockpile potions, I was able to comfortably get through the game neither feeling fragile nor invulnerable. The appearance of shops are well timed to just when players would need them. The weapon upgrades used in the RPG boards deter players from just running away, while not being so costly that you need to kill everything. If your health is getting a little too low, retreat is an option just as much as avoiding combat until the next store is.
For more notable foes ranging from Baba Yaga to a Frost Giant, the game switches to an RPG engine previously used in King's Quest ZZT. Here player and enemy alternate attacks and use a life bar made from breakables rather than using the player's health directly.
It's pretty much identical to King's Quest, foregoing the more typical pop up window with a list of actions for dedicated buttons for each possible attack. All the usual frills you'd expect from an Interactive Fantasies release are present with spells using invisible walls to create animated fireballs or crackles of lightning and martial weaponry using a number of objects to depict the swinging of a sword or firing of a bow.
Better weapons can be purchased at shops throughout the game. These require gold as well as having crossed certain experience point thresholds to be able to purchase them. They're basically mandatory as the battles that use them are very much damage races where your only other option is to hope the enemy casts a spell that misses. This does unfortunately mean that using a healing potion in battle isn't an option.
What you do have for defense, is a shield that can be raised rather than taking your normal turn. These defensive mechanics in ZZT RPGs usually are a waste of time where at best you block a random attack and nothing changes. Here it's worse than that. Comically so.
It could just do nothing at all, and that would be bad. Yet somehow the authors have managed to mess things up even more in an otherwise solidly programmed game (enough that there's no need for a bugs section at least [1]). Raising your shield wastes your turn, doesn't actually defend in any way from incoming damage, and then to top it all off, the enemy gets to take two turns when you use it.
For some bizarre reason, the shield raise/lower animation both starts with and ends with a #SEND command to tell the enemy it's their turn. The shield kills your faster!!
Something obviously went wrong here. Looking at the code, the tutorial fight is coded to check for the shield being raised and cause half damage to be taken. That fight has a bug of its own though where you can't actually raise a shield as no code path exists to do so! The other fights fail to set or check for a flag at all, but do remember to update the name of the enemy for each different fight twice to ensure they get their double action in response.
Even though the shield may be broken, there is one other item the player can get that does function properly, as long as you can actually manage to use it at exactly the right moment.
Just as in the originals, the key to defeating Baba Yaga is to use a magic mirror to reflect her spells back at her. This item continues to be usable in future fights providing a unique form of defense. It raises and lowers after a set time like the shield, except if an enemy casts a spell, it will properly bounce back dealing a lot of damage and protecting the hero from harm.
It's easier said than done though. There's no way to predict an enemy is going to cast a spell, which makes it a high risk item that might just be another turn waster.
The risk is mitigated a little bit in the Baba Yaga fight as it's also one of a few RPG battles where there are more than two participants. For fights like this, the game gets rid of the buttons to press for attacks and replaces it with an Active Time Battle system where everyone has to wait for a meter to fill before they can take any action. For Baba Yaga, you actually have a number of allies to help you, the various soldiers sent to defeat her who found themselves transformed into frogs until their form was restored by a dispel potion carried by the player.
When there are multiple party members like this, players can input attacks for them, which is just a basic attack save for one soldier that also knows a fireball spell. This way, it's a lot easier to ensure that damage is still being done even if the mirror fails. In addition, having visible attack meters allows you to at least only raise the mirror when an attack is about to fire off instead of hoping it all syncs up. This makes the mirror actually an interesting little mechanic in an otherwise very straightforward RPG system.
Other times, the tables are turned and it's several enemies against the lone hero. These are the kind of fights where you really have no hope if you aren't purchasing stronger weapons to chop your way through everyone's HP.
Today, the RPG engine feels very basic, but it's an excellent reference point for what to expect out of late 90s ZZT game. With multiple variations to suit specific combat needs, plenty of unique animations per fight, and a nice job making the fights tough enough that you can fail without being a frustrating series of RNG rolls that have to go your way, Quest For Glory gets to be flashy for the era with enough substance to keep it compelling even now.
We Puzzle Now And Then
As with King's Quest, the adaptation of Quest For Glory to ZZT skews more on the action side than puzzles. It's pretty rare that you actually have to stop and think is this game, with most of the non-combat obstacles amounting to having an item in your inventory and living, or not having said item and dying.
There are a few exceptions where Hydra and MeBo give players something different to do. When they do, they are original creations rather than being lifted from the source material. In one instance, it's due to ZZT being unable to really pull off what Sierra was doing, in another it's the team expanding a tiny section of the world map into something more substantial.
When visiting the wizard Erasmus, rather than play "Mage's Maze" to guide an automatically moving character by placing obstacles to manipulate their actions Quest For Glory ZZT settles for something a little easier to pull off. Instead, players are treated to "Magical Labyrinth", a Sokoban puzzle with some minor adjustments.
It's a staple of ZZT to push boulders onto fake walls and cover them up. This version goes for a dedicated region to push all the boulders to rather than pushing them all around the screen. A player clone tracks your steps (wall bonks do count) with a rather generous limit of 1000 steps.
Much like the combat, the difficulty is all in your head. With just how many boulders there are to push, it's hard to estimate how many steps it's going to take to get through the puzzle. Having a step limit at all though tricks the player into stepping more slowly and considering each movement even if by the time you're mostly finish you can tell the limit was completely superfluous. The sheer clutter is also a nice departure from the usual smaller puzzles with fakes. Players really do need to watch how they get their first few pieces in place to avoid creating an unwinnable situation.
Any player that does make a mistake is left with no choice other than to reload so step carefully!
The other notable puzzle appears in the greatly expanded ice plains areas. It too is a tweaked adaptation of a common puzzle type. The buttons toggle colors of water and raise them to be platforms the player can stand on in order to cross an icy river. Each button toggles the state of certain colors of floor/water, and touching the button a second time will toggle just one.
Even if the buttons themselves are still a little strange thing to encounter in the wilderness, tying the puzzle to a river crossing makes it fit in more than the usual approach of a series of walls which would be harder to work into an outdoor environment.
The puzzle also benefits from there being so many platforms. There should be multiple ways to actually cross, with both green + yellow + red and green + yellow + purple + blue allowing safe passage. Other disconnected platforms make some other connections almost work, but actually connecting them might make the puzzle a bit too easy.
If you've seen me play any puzzle like this on stream you know my default strategy is "mash buttons and see if it works out" before attempting to put any thought into them. This one took some work to finally get the pieces in order, making for a surprise challenge amidst an otherwise action-oriented segment of the game.
These puzzle are hardly the focus of Quest For Glory, after these the remaining puzzles encountered are just a few minutes apart, there's really nothing more until the very end of the game. That is, unless you count the player saying "I better hide in the bushes over there" and then having to stand behind a bush object to not be caught as a puzzle.
One of them though, really does stick out like a sore thumb. The second file begins with Hercules showing up just to annoy the players with everyone's favorite game: ZZT/MZX trivia.
Argh indeed my friend.
The trivia segment is a ten question gauntlet filled with a lot of questions where you better be familiar with the ZZT scene in 1998 to have a chance at answering them correctly. The question list asks players to identify which game was not made by a specific author; who has never been a part of Software Visions; what Epic MegaGames was originally known as; which game wasn't published under a certain company; which ZZT clone is still actively developed (reminding me that "Pock" is currently lost media). Etc. Etc. Even when you're getting the question right it still drags on.
And just like the quiz in Savage Isle the penalty for a mistake is to start over from the beginning. Brute forcing is an option and in fact recommended over answering questions 1-9 yet again, but if you don't know these things it's far easier to peek at the game's code and just look it up right away. These sections continue to be nifty records of the kinds of things the author felt were important bits of knowledge they've acquired, while also being very unappealing to play, even for me who has good odds at them. (They're more fun on stream though where I can pretend anybody is impressed when I'm right). The only saving grace is when they drop a factoid like Pock that has otherwise been forgotten to time.
One question I really don't approve of is the one about Software Visions members. Janson founded the company, so she's right out. Matt Williams's Coolness and Warlord's Temple are both included on the Software Visions ZZT Pack disk. Of the two remaining, I don't believe either Tim Gallagher or James Wong to have been in the company, turning the question into a 50/50 guess.
Hercules demands players answer Gallagher. I would love to know where the incorrect idea that James Wong had some connection to the company came from<.
Update: Terryn has kindly pointed out James Wong's connection to SV. It happened shortly before the company's disbanding, and over on the MegaZeux side of things. (See Azeroth Demo
At least there is one interesting bit of trivia about the trivia with the final question. The correct answer here is Legend of Ob'awscwadi. I hadn't heard of this MZX RPG that never happened, but I did immediately recognize "Ob'awscwadi" as the name of the village in Herc/Hydra's Deceiving Guidance. Was that what "'Egend 'o Ob'" eventually turned into a number of years later? It remains one of my favorite ZZT dungeon crawlers and I've love to get a glimpse at its origins. Or maybe it was just Hydra making a cheeky reference to an old project years down the line.
The final puzzle is one from the original that still captures its essence even in ZZT. As you raid the brigands' fortress, you'll have to deal with deal with reinforcements arriving at each entrance to the mess hall. Boulders need to be positioned in such a way that that brigands are forced to change routes until each option is blocked off and you can fight the few already in the room safely.
Hopefully this sequence plays better in the original. Here in ZZT, the boulders need to be pushed into a very precise spot, even though there are a number of places where they should function as obstructions.
This is a successful blockade of the eastern side.
This gets you killed. Not ideal.
Since this one is basically borrowed from Sierra, I guess I can't really praise it for being something more original to ZZT than Sokoban or gate-opening now, but as a child with no exposure to anything other than Hydra's adaptation, it certainly felt like a unique idea. Rarely do ZZTers choose for non-violent solutions, and it's pretty funny seeing the scene play out with these groups of brigands constantly charging at barricades and having to sheepishly turn around.
- [1] This is a revised edition of the game, and the differences are incredibly minor. One thing worth pointing out is that while the original game prevents you from taking the defeated frost giant's treasure due to "carrying too much", the update relaxes the restriction, specifying that you can take a "little bit". It also introduces a bug here where you can take as many "little bits" as your heart desires, getting infinite money. It's not necessary to get through the game, but if you want to stock up on healing potions to make the combat move a little faster by not needing to worry about taking so much damage, it can be an unexpected boon.
- [2] These numbers came from somewhere, and that somewhere is Town of ZZT, which has the exact same step values as well as other weird bits of garbage data. If Town loads automatically, then the player that spawns when editing a file will have those same values stored in it. Since Town loads by default in pretty much ever release of ZZT, having these values is actually extremely commonplace. Case in point, Bluey's Kobold Smoocher from 2021 is the most recent game I'm aware of to be made with ZZT's default editor, and sure enough it has those values for the player. Why does Town have these values? I have nooooooo idea.
