Boss Fight Books Kickstarter includes ZZT

[Dr. Dos]

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/gab ... ight-books

A series of books written by various authors about specific games. Volume 3 is ZZT and is to be written by Anna Anthropy.

[Commodore]

Done and done. Very nice.

[q2k2k]

Thats actually pretty interesting.

Also

Well not everyone has played ZZT, but everyone who played it became a game designer.

I am currently going into game design LOL

[Saxxon]

Yeah, that line... it rings some truth. By itself, it didn't encourage me to become a coder, but it did encourage me to think not so much about the code line-by-line but more abstract concepts (ZZT did a good job at taking a lot of boilerplate code out and focusing on the unique implementation.) This was really essential to learn more than one programming language. I know several now.

[Commodore]

Playing with my C64 made me want to make games. I taught myself BASIC as a very young age, and started writing games mostly in GW-BASIC. My yahoo email I won't let die: JDD Games was my "company". I made 3 1/2" disk covers out of bristol board and sharpie and tried to sell them around my elementary.

ZZT was right up my alley when I found it in 1995-6, even though I had Klick-n-Play before that, I never really took to it like ZZT. By then I was already (still) obsessed with the old stuff too.

[Quantum P.]

It's not mentioned on the Kickstarter page, but it is mentioned on her website: Anna Anthropy wants to interview people who grew up with ZZT.

So email her, and you might end up in a book or something.

[Dr. Dos]

She also started a tumblr for ZZT dialog http://unlawfulinvisibles.tumblr.com/

[Commodore]

Excerpt from book:

http://auntiepixelante.com/?p=2103

[Dr. Dos]

She also recently e-mailing me asking if I had any way to get in touch with Gingermuffins (creator of Eli's House). I do not and he has no contact info on his z2 account. If anybody does have a way to get in touch with him let me and/or Anna know!

[Commodore]

PM'ed

[max ass]

Release date June 2: http://bossfightbooks.com/products/zzt-by-anna-anthropy

[Smilymzx]

Awesome, Can't wait to buy and read about it this summer!

[Dr. Dos]

Kickstarter backers got their digital copies already. I read it. It owns.

[tapeworm]

I thought I had contributed to the Kickstarter, but I guess I never did. I just finished reading the book, though, and I liked it a lot. I'm glad she was able to interview people such as draco and Alexis Janson (and many others). It would be fun to read the extended interviews as well, if there was more to them.

You can get the book here (physical or digital):
http://bossfightbooks.com/products/zzt-by-anna-anthropy

Or here (Kindle only):
http://www.amazon.com/Boss-Fight-Books- ... 125&sr=8-1

[Dr. Dos]

1. what's your name? this can be a pseudonym, an internet handle, whatever. a name to use when i quote you.
Dr. Dos would be preferred.


2. what are your preferred pronouns? (she, he, they, etc.)
He, would also be preferred.


3. what was your first experience with ZZT? how did you encounter it, what was playing it like? how old were you?
I bought a Window 3.1 era Shareware CD at a yard sale in 1997. I would have been a few months shy of 9 at the time. My older brother and I eventually found Super ZZT on it and had a blast with Monster Zoo. We then found ZZT, though Town wasn't as cool. We were very new to computers, and didn't realize we could copy things _off_ the CD. This meant we were unable to save our game.

I think I'm fortunate that I put up with the text-mode graphics honestly. At the time we had a Playstation and Nintendo 64, yet I was still always playing those early 90s computer games. Maybe it was because the games were easier to succeed in as a child, or maybe I just realized that there was more to games than how pretty the graphics were.


4. did you make any / many ZZT games? what was your first ZZT game like?
For probably a few months at least I had no idea there even was an editor. Super ZZT's hidden editor certainly didn't help, although in retrospect I probably would've been annoyed trying to work with it rather than ZZT. Over a period or probably just over a decade I made maybe 15 games. Plenty of older ones never got released, and for every game that did get finished, there were probably another dozen started that never went anywhere.

ZZT games tend to have a certain charm and capture the author's personality. My earliest games are embarrassing because they're so crude. Poor design decisions, shoddy programming, and comically bad writing everywhere. My later releases are even worse though. Not because of how they play, but because they capture my teenage years and yearning for acceptance within the community by being hostile to those deemed annoying, and sucking up to those who were deemed cool. "Mooseka Rules With an Iron Fist" is a particularly egregrious example. You play as a rejected ZZT/MZXer (not a made up concept, an actual person in the community) and gather up other rejected ZZTers to overthrow the popular Mooseka and his reign of the ZZT community. The game is entirely storytelling, the player does nothing but walk other than hiding behind a plant on a single board. This person received constant abuse from me and numerous others online, had threatened to kill himself on occasion, was diagnosed with depression, and here I was making fun of all it. Oh, and of course I was friends with this person until I discovered he wasn't respected and that I could become more respected if I joined others in making fun of him. MRWAIF as the game was abbreviated to, went on to become a hit, and is actually a featured game on z2. The featured game review describes it as "lighthearted" which shows just how cynical the community was around 2004ish. "I think it's a step in the right direction for an increasingly tight-knit community in which everyone seems to know everyone else." is another quote from the review. The ZZT community's tight-knittedness certainly sped up its downfall.

Moving away from something I'm rather embarrassed and ashamed of now, there's always my first game, "Island of ZZT" which has been lost to the ages. I was 8 years old at the time. The game involved my brother becoming shipwrecked on an island and having to escape. This consisted of walking through some green fake walls which were grass and shooting lions until you found another boat. That's about all there is to say about that.

I recall at one point making my mother a game for Christmas where you played as her, and could talk to her friends, play a crude lion based Ms. Pac Man, and pet the family dog. I also remember writing a game where you interviewed characters from the book "Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry" in the 8th grade where you went around asking characters from the book how they felt about the events that happened at the end. The disk I copied it to when I brought it to school didn't work, and so the class didn't get to see ZZT.

In my senior year of high school, we had to do a senior project based on our interests that we could pursue professionally. My original plan was to teach elementary school students how to make games with ZZT. (Progamming being the professional goal, not making ZZT games!) I was too worried it would be rejected though and wound up not doing so. With the way the community was by that point, it's probably for the best I didn't bring a dozen 12 year olds into it.

I did introduce my friends to ZZT with a bit more success however. One of them went on to make School ZZT, which is generally considered to be the worst ZZT game of all time. Shortly after that the ZZT archive implemented a quality filter before they'd add any games, making use of Super Tool Kit's extended colors mandatory as well as a 10KB minimum size limit. Whoops!


5. what was your life like at the time you were making ZZT games? was there any major upheaval happening in your lie?

My involvement in ZZT lasted pretty much a decade so there was quite a bit! I've been fortunate to have caring parents and a stable home life, so ZZT was more of a creative outlet than a therapeutic one. My coming out as gay online was done on Livejournal, which was followed almost entirely by fellow ZZTers, but it never really had an impact on that.


6. what influenced or inspired the ZZT games that you made? other games, movies, music? events happening in your life? other ZZT authors?

Other videogames of the time were definitely a major influence. I came up with the idea for Aura after discovering how to play burned discs on the Sega Dreamcast. Playing Ikaruga with its shifts between black/white determining what hurts you as well as Gauntlet's hordes of enemies via an NES emulator blurred together.

Other ZZT games also played a big role. The majority of games being editable made it really easy to find a concept you thought was cool and see exactly how it was done. I think most ZZTers in the late 90s fell in love with RPG battle engines, almost none of which were any good. I know I looked at several of them and felt really proud when I made one myself that worked.


7. did you interact with any online ZZT communities? how did you discover those communities? what were they like? what did you feel like your role or position in the community was?

I found the ZZT Archive maybe a year or so after discovering ZZT with a random search on probably Web Crawler. The site later became zzt.org and then z2, the title it uses to this day. The site was the first time I ever spoke with people online and the connections which sprung from the ZZT community are pretty much why I'm involved with every online group I share today. It's mindblowing to me to think that one garage sale purchase is the root of the majority of choices and opportunities I've had in my life. I got my current job from a friend who I met not through ZZT, but through another message board I was pointed to by a ZZTer. Without ZZT I'd be living near Scranton, Pennsylvania rather than Pittsburgh Pennsylvania. I've visited friends in Chicago, L.A, and San Francisco, despite originally being terrified of flying because I wanted to meet some of these people just one degree of separation from ZZT.

In the early years (the late 90s) my involvement in the community was pretty limited, dial-up Internet shared with 3 other family members which included a teenage brother who loved talking with his girlfriend on the phone, and my mother, an R.N. who would sometimes be on call meant I didn't get too deeply involved. I think it's biggest influence in the earlier days was seeing the "Game of the Month" award. I could think of nothing that would be more prestigious than winning that. None of my games of the time were anywhere near the quality that would win, but it was fun to think about. I did later win a "Madtom's Pick" award and get two Featured Games, both successors in spirit of the GotM awards. Though by that time it was more of a cool thing rather than a childhood badge of honor.

ZZT shifted from a program to make games to a community of friends probably around 2003 or so. By this point I was on ZZT related irc channels and constantly posting on the forums. ZZT.exe got more and more neglected as time went on. This is the timeframe where all my connections were made and they gave me a much better persective on the world than a tiny town in Pennsylvania ever would. Suddenly I was speaking with people in New York, Massachusetts, New Zealand, Canada, England, and the Netherlands. The community was getting more and more tightly knit, and also more cynical in regards to how new members were treated.

The later years, 2008 onwards could be only described as desolate. It is rare to stick by ZZT in college years, and even rarer after graduation. By this point the people who inspired me with their games as a child were long gone. The community was more so a group of friends who met through ZZT than actually creating new games. Once 64-bit OSes became the norm ZZT had the final nail in the coffin really. It was no longer a game a child could find and begin playing and creating with, but a game that required you to download Dosbox, mount a virtual filesystem, or download a Dosbox frontend to do so for you.

To a degree I did try and save it. A friend convinced me to give the programming language Python a try, and suggested I use the Pygame library and try to make a game. I started making Yahtzee as it seemed rather simple, just a few dice and some scoring. I eventually got bored and as a joke tried to make something that would read a ZZT world and draw a board from it, just to see how far I would get before I got in over my head.

The result of this was Tyger, a ZZT remake with a few enhanced features. It slowly went from viewing boards, to running around in them, to getting a decent amount of ZZT-OOP implemented. A few games actually became playable. Eventually I hit a point where my lack of experience was making it more and more difficult to implement things which were missing and the project went abandoned. I did get a little bit ahead of myself though, and started extending ZZT-OOP to add more functionality that I felt it was lacking. This wasn't a problem, but with 2 or 3 ZZT games coming out a year by this point it was a diversion from something that would be backwards compatible.

Tyger eventually inspired somebody by the name of Saxxon to try their own luck. He dubbed his project Lyon. He dug through ZZT's assembly to make things far more accurate than Tyger's "observe behavior and try to mimic it" strategy. Alas it is only available for Windows. Lyon is in a very playable state, enough that I would suggest that those who are not familiar with Dosbox would be better off using it if they wished to play ZZT games today. (It also supports Super ZZT!)

Today, when there's posts on the forums that aren't related to Lyon's development, it tends to be speaking of ZZT in the past tense. It made it over 20 years, and had a fantastic run.


7 1/2. you moderate or have moderated zzt.org. how has that community changed since you first became involved with it? what is it like now?

I suppose this is covered better in the previous half of the question!


8. what sort of reactions did you receive to your work, if any? did any reaction to your game have a strong positive or negative effect on you?

My earlier games were bland and mediocre and received very little attention. Generally negative! I think I mostly disregarded them when I was younger. I did enjoy any praise I got, and recall being proud of getting 3rd place in a 24 hours of ZZT contest (ignoring the fact that only 6 entries were submitted).


9. are there any ZZT games that you remember as having a strong effect on you

Link's Adventure, Dogfight, War-Torn, Burger Joint, and Evil Sorcerer's Party all spring to mind right away. The three Link's Adventure titles were an early inspiration, and many incomplete games of mine followed its set of levels with a mini boss and main boss formula. They also are an excellent example today of personal improvement. The games get nice looking and more complex as the series progresses, and I think they serve as an excellent example of what a traditional ZZT game is. They were a wonderful start for me in learning how ZZT-OOP could be used to make enemies and items. It's still fun to play today, although flaws such as an overabundance of stars ruin it a little.

Dogfight was a space-invaders style game, and was the first game I played that relied on an engine, a series of objects working in tandem, to create a new experience. The player moved into an enclosed space with objects on three sides, allowing them to move their ship from side to side or shoot. That game was what got me to become aware of the idea of making things that weren't just overhead action games. Today it doesn't really hold up, it plays noisy and rather clunky due to the mechanics of how ZZT handles movement of objects.

War-Torn was an RPG, possibly the firs ZZT RPG I played, but it stuck with me. The RPG battle engine was the most complex thing I had seen done in ZZT, and (to my young self) it had a great story that really hooked me. For many years I considered it my favorite ZZT game. Nowadays it still has a charm to it, and very much feels like a teenager trying to create an epic story of adventure, suspense, and romance.

Burger Joint was by the author of War-Torn and was a tremendous hit when it was released. If you wanted to show somebody a ZZT game that had more originality than most titles today, I would definitely suggest it. The game took place entirely on one board (well, one board repeated with different objects due to ZZT's limitations) and consisted of you getting a job in the world's first fast food restaurant. Customers would come in and it was up to you to keep them happy, or at the very least, make sure if they were unhappy, that they didn't spread bad press. The game handled all these events in real time, forcing the player to act quickly in order to make it through each encounter without being fired (an instant game over). It is one of a very small number of ZZT games I would highly recommend non-ZZTers play at some point.

If Burger Joint is ZZT's finest unique game, Evil Sorceror's Party is ZZT's most professional. ESP went through a few years of development, and it shows. The game is four files long, has honest to god good writing, some of the best graphics ZZT has seen, excellent puzzle design, and memorable music! It is essentially a Lucas Arts point and click adventure turned into a 16-color ascii game.

I have no idea which ZZT games you'll be playing while you write this book, but I cannot urge you enough to make sure that Burger Joint and ESP are two of them.


10. do you still make games or other forms of art? has working with ZZT informed your current work in any substantial way?

I have toyed with making games outside of ZZT but haven't finished much of anything. Gamewise the only complete projects were Contingency 88, made for the Something Awful Gamedev Challenge where you're given one month to make a game. The game is a puzzle game where you rig an election in your favor by gerrymandering cities into districts where you'll get more votes. As of writing this I'm remaking it as a browser based multiplayer game for this year's contest.

The only other project I finished was Chimp or Chump, a memory game that I first saw in a video about the incredible short-term memories of chimpanzees. Players would see a sequence of numbers on a grid and then have to click them in order as fast as they could, but once the first one was clicked, the others would disappear, leaving them to remember their position.

Contingency 88: http://labtanner.com/gamedev/index.php? ... ingency_88
Chimp or Chump: http://chimporchump.com

I am forever thankful for ZZT's simplicity and letting me program nearly a decade before friends of mine would begin. Being familiar with loops and conditionals from day one of a CS101 class was certainly a boon.

ZZT did teach me one major lesson: "less is more". When you made a ZZT game you couldn't make anything too elaborate, you had to come up with something and run with it. It was hard enough to complete something with ZZT to limit me, I can't imagine how much worse it would have been if an RPG I'd want to make could've had a dozen characters in the party, with 20 weapons and 30 spells each. Working with limits forces a creativity in how you do things without the pressures of freedom. I never had to write music or draw graphics that I'd be forced into with most other games.


11. what's the greatest risk you've taken in your life, unrelated to ZZT?

I've never been much of a risk-taker I'm afraid. I suppose I'd have to say my trip to Chicago. It was the first time in my life that my online world and physical world met. The majority of people I considered my friends had only been text on a screen before then. Getting to meet people then and over the years afterwards gave me a sense of belonging more than I've ever felt before, being able to have people with me with an alignment of interests far greater than what a tiny town in Pennsylvania had to offer.


12. the ZZT wiki you linked seems really hostile and homophobic. is that a fair assessment?

It's difficult for me to answer that. The hostility there is more of ZZT's darker days being much better documented. I would not hesitate to suggest anybody who grew up with ZZT should feel welcome to contribute to the wiki. You will not be chased away or have your pages vandalized. Calling it homophobic though is a bit tougher. The ZZT community was the first group of people I actually came out to. I want to say it's "ironic homophobia", but I cannot in good conscience try to downplay it by saying that since nobody in the community _actually_ hated gays it's somehow acceptable. I, along with a lot of other people would call things we didn't like gay and call people f*gs all the time back then. The ZZT community's casual homophobia was by no means acceptable, and if I found present day me attempting to join the community in that timeperiod, I would be uncomfortable and I wouldn't feel welcome or stick around. I cringe trying to answer this, trying to phrase things in a way that don't look like I'm excusing it. I never felt mistreated as a gay man in the community, and though I obviously cannot speak for other LGBT members of the community I am not aware of anybody else who was. I certainly hope nobody was bothered and not comfortable with speaking up about it.

There were a few people who did join who were genuinely upset at LGBT persons for having the gall to exist. All of these people were the people we were most hostile to. You can look up Jazzy or Gorth on ZU for examples. Both of them (at least a few years ago) still showed up on IRC on occasion, and have since mellowed out.

I do know that a lot of us are embarrassed by it now. I know you've spoken on Twitter with FSFunky (@jvdgoot), who is definitely far more aware of cultural homophobia, privilege, and how it influenced us. I imagine he would say the same thing.

-----

Thank you very much for taking the time to read my words. Apologies if they're not anything you're looking for. If you have any more questions or want clarification on something, please feel free to email me again! I'll try and answer a bit faster.

As I realize that ZZT isn't something most people are familiar with, this project is a wonderful way to help keep the memories alive. I cannot thank you enough for choosing to write about ZZT!