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Comment by csense | Hacker News Reader

For those who are unaware, ZZT was a text-mode DOS adventure game written in 1991 by the founder of Epic Games, Tim Sweeney.

It included a level editor and scripting language, which allowed anyone to unleash their creativity and design their own text-mode games using the ZZT engine.

This was absolutely unique at the time.

As a company, Epic is still hugely successful. Most gamers in 2020 have probably heard of Fortnite and Unreal Engine. According to Wikipedia, Tim Sweeney still owns over 50% of the company.

ZZT explored a lot of ideas about how to build a game creation system, which influenced Unreal Engine, which itself was hugely influential throughout the game industry.

The standard paradigms for today's game engines and editors was clearly influenced by ZZT.

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> It included a level editor and scripting language, which allowed anyone to unleash their creativity and design their own text-mode games using the ZZT engine.

> This was absolutely revolutionary at the time.

Well... OK, I'll give you this maybe in the DOS world and maybe on the US side of the Atlantic. Maybe. And granted that we didn't all, me included, have access to the latest and greatest of anything back then: you knew only what you were exposed to through computing magazines, cover disks, and printed manuals, and you might not have extensive access to many of those. Almost all of my paper round income went on computer magazines back then.

Still, AGT (Adventure Game Toolkit), based on an earlier program called GAGS, was released for DOS in 1987.

Moreover, in the 8-bit world, The Quill was released for the ZX Spectrum in 1983, GAC (Graphic Adventure Creator) was released in 1985 for Amstrad, ZX Spectrum, C64, and even BBC Micro, and PAW (Professional Adventure Writer) - a successor to Quill - was released in 1987.

Point being, a wide variety of text and graphic adventure "construction set" programs were introduced in the early 1980s, and were widespread by the early 1990s.

They indeed were; ZZT is far from the first game creation tool.

However, most of those were either commercial products or restricted the editing capabilities in some manner to free users. ZZT was shareware, but the registered version differed solely in the amount of official game worlds available (and the lack of a registration message on exit). The editor was fully-featured and no restrictions were put on usage. This is what I think makes it stand out from other game creation tools of the era and what made it a popular tool on BBSes.

The "free" of it definitely made a difference, but there was also a certain lack of concern about the shape of the resulting product that made ZZT feel different and more flexible than the preceding tools when you tried to work with it.

It had built-in, non-configurable stuff for action gameplay with some puzzle elements. It did very little with regards to assets, unlike contemporaries - no animation sets or hitbox definitions or music importer or similar ideas, really just a level editor. It was just not good in terms of shelf-space bullet points - nothing flashy about it. If that was all that it had, it would not be a hugely differentiated game since the level editor concept had been around since Lode Runner.

But it also had code, and code integrated in a way that was well documented and tutorialized. It had scripted behaviors, functionality to manipulate and transform the board, and hypertext dialogues with event flag toggles. Having the hypertext and flags may have been the one most critical part of all this since it really enabled choice-based interactive storytelling techniques, and that's a huge deal even if you didn't have enough of an algorithms background to try abusing the other functionality to make a platformer or whatnot.

And so I think the longevity of ZZT really rests in the way that it guides you towards code, because it has so little else to offer.

I remember a bunch of game authoring packages from the old days. The Shoot-em-up Construction Kit (SEUCK) made in 1987 by Sensible Software was popular on C64. Codemasters released something called Creations which was demonstrated by one of the Darling brothers on UK Saturday morning tv in the 80s. I remember him making some kind of single screen platform game in it.

One of the most impressive was the 3D Construction Kit from Incentive Software (who also published the Graphic Adventure Creator/GAC). Released in 1991, it used the Freescape 3d engine from Driller (1987) and Castle Master (1990). I remember it being a big deal in the magazines of the time.

(As an aside, I've wanted to investigate the hypothesis that early 90s VR tools like Sense8 Worldtoolkit may have had an influence on modern game engines, but I have never been able to find out much about them)

I remember spending hours playing with the level editor as a kid. Then, as a teenager, I spent hours building levels for a moderately successful Unreal Tournament mod/total conversion.

Was mind-blowing to find out the same guy was behind both (not to mention Jazz Jackrabbit, which I also loved)!

Speaking of Jazz Jackrabbit, I always enjoyed seeing the poster in Fortnite when I used to play it.

I remember some folks doing publications with it. I can't remember what it was about specifically but it was a monthly thing. Read magazine -> play a small game at the end.

There's an entire genre at the Museum of ZZT dedicated specifically to in-game "magazines" covering community-created games and previews -> https://museumofzzt.com/search?genre=Magazine

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