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ZZT is a 1991 action-adventure puzzle video game and game creation system developed and published by Potomac Computer Systems for MS-DOS. The game was later released as freeware in 1997. It represents an early example of a game that allowed players to edit using object-oriented programming. Players control a smiley face to battle various creatures and solve puzzles in different grid-based boards in a chosen world. It includes an in-game editor, allowing players to develop their own worlds while using the game's scripting language, ZZT-OOP.

The game was designed by mechanical engineering student Tim Sweeney, and took roughly nine months to develop. The game was built from a text editor conceived in 1989 to build a better editor for Pascal, after disliking editors that came with other programming languages for his computer. During development, he experimented with adding creatures and characters, building boards that grew into worlds while refining the editor he used to create his own games. Initially he make the game for himself, but after positive reception from his friends and neighbors, and seeing the potential for making a profit by releasing the game under shareware, he decided to release the game publicly.

ZZT received generally positive reception, and was a commercial success, selling around 4,000 - 5,000 copies by 2009. Much of the positive reception focusing on the editor, and the community it developed. The game was followed by a sequel, Super ZZT (1992). Other ZZT worlds were published later that same year as Best of ZZT and ZZT's Revenge. The game's success led Sweeney to change his company's name to Epic MegaGames, and focus on competing as a video game company using shareware to distribute commercial games. Epic MegaGames later developed other successful games including Jill of the Jungle (1992) and Unreal (1998), the latter using ZZT as a road map by focusing on developing the editor and engine to allow others to more easily make games. The game also features one of the earliest active modding communities, that has grown around the game through making new worlds and editing tools.

Gameplay
ZZT is a top-down action-adventure puzzle video game and game creation system. Players control a white smiley face on a navy-blue rectangle that can move around in four directions. Players can interact with objects by touching or shooting at them. Touching ammo containers, gems, torches, and keys adds them to your status bar. Boxes of ammo allow players to fire bullets at objects, gems increase health and are used as currency, torches light up a small area around the player in dark boards, and colored keys allow players to open same-colored doors. Other objects in the game includes bombs, doors, and scrolls. One type of object called "Object" interacts based on written scripts using the game's scripting language, ZZT-OOP. As an example, the object could be programmed to give the player health, or fire bullets at the player. At any time, players can save their progress, and return to the game's exact state.

Game worlds are made up of objects within grid boards that connect to each other. Players can move across different boards by either reaching the edge of the board or entering teleporters. Six game worlds were made for the game's release; four of them are games, and each of the four starts in a unique way. Town of ZZT starts in a hub world with four buildings mixed with six exits, Caves of ZZT opens with a sparse area of torches and a scroll, Dungeons of ZZT starts with a linear opening sequence with gates that lock you inside, and City of ZZT opens with a city street as a hub with a few structures. Two other worlds were included, but served different purposes. Guided Tour ZZT's Other Worlds highlighted levels of the registered worlds following Town of ZZT, while Demo of the ZZT World Editor creates parallels to a museum, showing all of the items, terrains, and creatures that make up ZZT. The goal of these worlds is to reach the end board, progressing either by collecting purple keys to open locked doors, or objects throughout the world. Boards can contain action and/or puzzles. Action boards have the player face off against creatures. Creatures include lions, tigers, and bears. When creatures, bullets, or stars touch the player, they lose health. Once the player runs out of health, the game ends. Puzzles consist of untangling combinations of boulders, sliders, and pushers, or mazes sometimes including invisible walls and teleporters. Some puzzles can trap the player, leading players to require a return to an earlier save.

ZZT includes an in-game editor, allowing players to make their own worlds. Players would start with yellow normal walls surrounding a new board as a blank screen, where players can add and arrange items, creatures, and terrain to the board. Each board can also be set to include specific settings, such as adding a time limit, making the board dark so the player could not see the board without a torch, or limiting the number of bullets on screen at any given time. Graphics are made using a 2-bit colour palette and ASCII characters to develop environments. Sound effects would be programmed using the PC speaker.

Development
Video game programmer Tim Sweeney studying mechanical engineering at the University of Maryland, first developed ZZT as a text editor that ran in Turbo Pascal. During this time, Tim did not know how to program graphics and only had a 286 computer and a Model M keyboard. The text editor idea came from disliking the included editors for the programming languages he tried on his PC. Instead he wanted to recreate his previously made Pascal-like programming environment for the Apple II. Over time, he experimented with adding collision to text characters, and making the cursor a controllable character, and found it more fun to make it into a game by adding bullets and creatures to fight against using text characters to identify them. From there, he designed his first levels from text files that served as different boards similar in style to Atari's Adventure, and continually offering additions to the game and editor over time. Given the graphics were dated for its time, he could produce ideas such as talking trees or interesting characters, without concerns about breaking immersion. Most of these additions were his own, but occasionally took ideas from Kroz, such as the bomb. Sweeney would study his degree during the day, while working on his game during the night. The game took around six to nine months to develop, taking under 1,000 hours of time spent developing the game, and making around 20,000 lines of Pascal code.

He then shared it with friends and neighborhood kids, observing how they responded to the game. From seeing the joy and excitement from others playing his game, he found making games to share something with the world, and to make more income instead of his former business of mowing lawns for neighbors or wage labor. The game's episodic model took inspiration from Apogee's shareware model, where Sweeney encouraged the spread of the game across shareware vendors, user groups, and bulletin board systems. During development, he wrote to Scott Miller for advice and to learn more about the industry. Miller responded while offering him encouragement. Tim chose the name so it would be listed last alphabetically in shareware catalogs and on bulletin board systems, though a fan later suggested the backronym of "Zoo of Zero Tolerance", which Sweeney endorsed. He would also sell the game as the first major game with object-oriented programming. ZZT was released in January 15, 1991. Town of ZZT alongside the in-game editor would be distributed freely, while the other official worlds would normally be sold by mail order to receive a single floppy disk including the purchased worlds, and drawn maps of each of the worlds. At one point, City of ZZT was also distributed as ZZT's City, through Softdisk's On Disk Monthly service. Each of the remaining official worlds, along with other ZZT games were later released as freeware on October 10, 1997.

Reception
Following ZZT release, the game sold about three to four copies daily, selling around 800 copies of ZZT by November 1991, and around 4,000 to 5,000 copies in total by 2009. This gave Sweeney around $100 a day by November 1991, and made around $30,000 from ZZT by May 1999, of which most of the profit came from its first year. After Sweeney moved out of his parents' house to establish proper corporate headquarters for Potomac Computer Systems, then renamed Epic MegaGames, his father, Paul Sweeney, continued fulfilling mail orders to the original address under the "Epic Classics" label, allowing for purchase of physical copies of ZZT. The final copy of ZZT was shipped to game designer Zack Hiwiller in November 2013.

Historic and contemporary reviews from critics were mixed. A comment from Computer Gaming World billed ZZT as "truly charming", finding the gameplay "simple to learn". Scott Wolf of PC Gamer (US) stated the graphics and sound for ZZT to be "truly awful", while the gameplay seves as a flashback to "when gameplay wasn't overshadowed by flashy video and animation". Benj Edwards has called ZZT an "influential and underrated game", crediting its current enjoyment from playing community worlds and making unexpected things with the "fairly robust" built in editor. This is while crediting the official worlds for being a "depthy adventure game full of puzzles, challenge, and humor". Rock Paper Shotgun's Ollie Toms focused on the editor, finding the game to be more like "a colourful, characterful, years-long course in scripting and programming games". He wrote that while ZZT-OOP was basic and limited, children could learn about and make games without knowing anything about programming. Hardcore Gaming 101 in a podcast episode stated ZZT was "not all that fun", criticizing that official worlds and community made worlds included unavoidable damage, and instant death. They found that games that attempted to expand and push the engine further are generally "rough around the edges", or "more functional rather than good". Rather, they admired ZZT like a science experiment or a demo from a demoscene, existing to study and push the limits of ZZT, finding the game itself and the community that built from it technically impressive.

Legacy
On getting $100 a day from ZZT, Sweeney was convinced he could earn enough from the shareware industry, and moved towards the gaming industry. He renamed the company to Epic MegaGames on October 1991. Shortly after the release of ZZT, Sweeney started a level designer contest for registered users to make their own worlds and submit them to him. Over 200 users submitted their custom worlds. The best collaboration games that won the contest were included in The Best of ZZT and ZZT's Revenge, released in 1992. The winners of the contest received prizes of gift certificates. The six winning custom worlds that made up ZZT's Revenge earned the designers employment in Epic MegaGames. Other contestants got honorable mentions for good entries. Sweeney later asked one of these developers, Allen Pilgrim on creating a world for the sequel to ZZT, Super ZZT, released on October 15th, 1991 with the shareware world "Monster Zoo". The game plays similarly to ZZT, while adding more features and levels to ZZT core gameplay, such as floor textures, a different gameplay menu, prefabricated enemies and objects, and scrolling map screens, allowing for much larger worlds than in ZZT. Although Super ZZT incorporated several additions to ZZT, it never caught on with the ZZT community like the original ZZT did, and very few games were ever created for Super ZZT, with one reason beinig due to the editor being hidden during normal play. Around 1992, Sweeney started a contest titled "ZZTaholics Challenge" for players to play any of the ten volumes from ZZT, ZZT's Revenge and Super ZZT, then submit their high scores. The winners received discount coupons to get the next two releases from Epic MegaGames for free.

After publishing Best of ZZT and ZZT's Revenge, Sweeney realized the community began creating worlds that reached or exceeded the quality of his work. Furthermore, he believed that games with cutting edge graphics and sound similar in commercial quality to Super Nintendo or Sega Genesis games would sell more in the shareware model, taking influence from Commander Keen and Duke Nukem. As such, he moved away from ZZT indefinitely to work on other projects like Jill of the Jungle, though has commented on wanting to build a massive-multiplayer online version of ZZT. Sweeney and Mark Rein later credited that much of the core idea of Unreal and Unreal Engine came from what Sweeney learned from the success of ZZT, with a focus on building games with clean code and editing tools, so that others can build their own games. Mark Rein has claimed that Unreal Tournament became a spiritual successor to the game thanks to the game's modding community and versatile developer tools.

The game has developed an early example of a modding community. Many fan-made worlds and editing tools were created following the game's release, with a fan website, Museum of ZZT, devoted to archiving and curating game worlds and utilities made by users. The game provided those in the community with an outlet for creativity and exploration of themselves without artistic or programming skills, especially among stigmatized groups such as transgender people. As of 2021, more than 3,000 worlds have been created and archived whether made using the built in editor, or third party editors such as KevEdit. Tim Sweeney has claimed that tens of thousands of workers in the game industry have previously made worlds in ZZT. A source port called "Zeta" allowed for playing ZZT games on Microsoft Windows or a web browser, while another source port, "DreamZZT", attempted ports to consoles, specifically the Sega Dreamcast and Nintendo DS. Worlds continue to be developed that have expanded beyond its intended genre, creating shoot 'em ups, falling block puzzle games, complex role-playing games, and point-and-click adventure games. While the source code of ZZT was lost in a crash, a community developer, Adrian Siekierka, reconstructed and released the source code in 2020, creating a binary accurate executable of ZZT with permission of Sweeney. Other games have been inspired by ZZT, such as MegaZeux, PuzzleScript and Frog Fractions 2, and authors of ZZT worlds went on to become video game developers. Rock Paper Shotgun has made comparisons to Minecraft and Roblox, in its ability to serve as a start for new video game developers. Hardcore Gaming 101 considered the game an internet meme, with one staff member even comparing it to the Skinner & The Superintendent sketch of The Simpsons.