z2

I was looking around on YouTube and noticed my name on a video showing me something I hadn't seen in almost 20 years... Talk about a blast from the past. I created the Ruby of Resurrection game (my only finished game) sometime shortly after creating the club on Prodigy. Prodigy was a message board kind of like this, except imagine it on a 320x200 screen in EGA 16-color graphics and you had maybe 8 topics per screen. We were settled in on the Games M-Z page (there was a Games A-L page too) as the very last entry.

My name is Carlos and I was the original creator and "president" or "#1" of the old ZZT Club back on Prodigy along with Jamie Holub (#2), Chris Jong (I believe he was #3 but I don't remember), the Hsu brothers and so many others. I created the club back when I was about 12 or 13 sometime in late 1991 or 1992 (I don't remember a lot of stuff from back then) and I just have fond, fuzzy memories of talking back and forth with a lot of people who were interested in the phenomenon of ZZT.

I really can't believe it's still popular to this day and while I would never take credit for any of it, I feel like it was no accident that this game had something special and that I had a small part in the history of ZZT. At one point I believe we had close to 40 members, which maybe was 1% of Tim's entire customer base for ZZT, lol. I know I've given that guy a lot more money over the years with Gears of War and Unreal Tournament, he certainly deserves every penny.

I remember starting a game called Apocalypse which I never finished. I was hitting every limit in ZZT. My favorite game (also unfinished I believe) was Jamie's Super ZZT Space Trek, which was kind of a Star Trek riff.

I'm not sure anyone even cares any more or that anyone would remember the old ZZT Club. I read an article from John Shipley talking about the old days which really brought back some memories as well. I don't remember all the details of how the club broke up, but it involved my losing access to Prodigy when they went to a pay-per-minute model. I would hop on maybe once a week but at that point the club splintered in many ways and I lost interest in ZZT.

I continued developing a VGA version of ZZT which I originally called ZZT2 and later renamed to Z2 after sending a copy of it to Tim Sweeney, he asked me to rename it. It was a pretty ambitious effort and included a Quake-style console, a full featured editor including the ability to create your own 16x16 tiles and scrolling boards plus an expanded version of the ZZT-OOP language. I remember emailing back and forth with Gregory Jansen (of MegaZeux fame) talking about design issues after I posted my design document. I wish I still had those files, I looked all over and could not find it. The performance was bad and the world playing engine was terribly slow. I was working on a 486 and most everyone at the time had 386's. Doom also kind of killed all my free time. :)

Anyway, just wanted to talk about some of the old days, and if you found it interesting great. If you don't believe I am the guy who created the ZZT Club, that's fine. I have no way of proving who I am. Hope everyone has a great time and to keep creating cool stuff!

Hi, Nice to meet you, I also saw Greg J. (Tromdage) at DigitalMZX.net from time to time also.

BTW: Welcome To Z2, We'd love ZZT Club members of the 1990s, Since you've kind of know me (Also on DigitalMZX), I am sorry you lost the source code.

(I lost the copy during a Hard Drive Crash)

Nice you found your way here carlos! If you have the time we have a wiki to document history. It's be great if we could fill in more from the "dark ages". http://zzt.org/zu/wiki/Main_Page. I'm also interested if you know where I can find that article by John Shipley.

amusing coincidence #1: z2 (the website) vs. Z2 (the zzt clone)
amusing coincidence #2: i think "the creator" was working on a project called "xBox" at some point during the 90's? according to the zzt lexicon it, too, was a zzt clone

xbox, it is so huge. anyway hello code red bus driver man.

looks like nadir's got a rival for most senior zzter. uh oh.

i humbly acquiesce to Carlos the Silver

I'm not sure if I remember much about those days, but I can certainly try to help out with your wiki/history.

The article is actually an interview with John Shipley...

The article is here: http://if.digitalmzx.net/feature-prodigyzztclub.shtml

I saw ZapZak recently which was made by Tim Gallagher one of our earlier members, that was a terrific game, really pushed the boundaries of what ZZT could do.

Anyway, I'll try to hop in when I can, was just really stunned to see that youtube video, lol. And I'm sure there are more senior members, I've been away from ZZT for about 15 years, so there's many people with more ZZT mileage than me. :)

Welcome, Carlos!

John Shipley was a sympathetic guy. I wonder how he's doing.

Hey Carlos. Wanted to chime in with sorrow about you losing the Z2 source. My first kick in the #MegaZeux IRC channel was after I asked you something like when Z2 would be released (after you'd just warned people not to ask that), within my first two minutes ever on IRC in my life. You later let me beta test Z2 after I emailed you with a well-thought out email (as opposed to a one line begging email). I miss those days, especially since I've been in one of my nostalgic moods lately.

I swear I had a copy of the Z2 source on an old hard drive -- I think I got it after posting a request in the old mWorld forums, but I wasn't able to find that drive at my parents' house the last time I was there, so I think it's probably gone for good. It had a lot of my old ZZT and MegaZeux stuff on it, so I'm pretty bummed. I hope someone out there still has a copy and can post it sometime.

Also, wanted to say I enjoyed playing your other non-ZZT games back in the day. The two I remember are Big Bucks (still haven't found a stock market simulator I've liked as much as that) and Genghis Khan.

Anyway, sorry for the rambling. Your post just brought back some good memories.

Resurrecting a 10.5-year-old thread, but it's in order to point out a new relevant discovery.

From the MegaZeux community, Elig has chimed in with a backup copy of the Z2 game creation system! Unfortunately, it was missing quite a lot of files (the System Room, the fonts, the sound effects) - but I managed to get it to run anyway (with replacement and not original fonts, however).



I unveiled it at a livestream yesterday, a recording of which is available here.

The files we have of Z2 v0.61 are available on the Museum of ZZT: https://museumofzzt.com/file/z/z2demo61_incomplete.zip
The replacement font files necessary for running (plus the tool I hacked up to generate them)f are available here: https://zeta.asie.pl/z2_replacement_fonts.zip

oh good, you were able to pull something back from the void!