It's amazing what you can do with just a bit of text mode... Today on Ancient DOS Games, Gemini's taking a look at ZZT, the game creation system made by Tim Sweeney which launched his startup company Potomac Computer Systems in 1991, which became Epic MegaGames the very next year. Although ZZT is severely outdated compared to some other similar game creation systems, notably Megazeux, it came out at a time when the notion of a GCS hadn't really been realized and was mostly reserved for inventory based adventure titles. That said, there were still tons of fun games made for this thing and it's still neat to go back to it for sake of nostalgia, though anyone wanting to make a text mode based game and not wanting to have to deal with severe limitations is probably better off sticking with modern versions of Megazeux. :B ------------------------------------------ Additional Information and Corrections: * Here's where you want to go if you want to get ZZT and a bunch of games to go with it: http://zzt.org * Yes, I know that I showed the program at 1:1 pixel aspect even though it normally wouldn't have looked like that on real hardware. This is another one of those things I feel plays better on a modern system with a wide screen display without the aspect correction letterboxing it. You can see the original aspect ratio when the game stats show up. ;) * Although I listed it in the game stats, I neglected to mention that the monochrome support is also able to utilize the "bold" character feature, so it's technically able to produce three shades, not just two. This is handled automatically depending on which colours are being used. The Monochrome support is also why the selected colour when editing is typed out on screen. * The name "ZZT" doesn't actually mean anything and was simply a means to ensure that this thing always showed up at the bottom of any game lists on BBSes and whatnot. :B ------------------------------------------ Pixelmusement Website: http://www.pixelships.com ADG on Pixelmusement: http://www.pixelships.com/adg Alphabetical Index of ADG Episodes: http://www.pixelships.com/adg/index2.html