Stumbling Tours: Epic Megagames, Part 1: ZZT
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- Опубліковано 4 жов 2024
- A journey through the back catalogue of the great Epic Megagames, covering their history from ZZT to Unreal Tournament!
This episode covers the early days of Epic, with Tim Sweeney's accidental world-builder ZZT and its followup.
Museum of ZZT: www.museumofzzt...
Boss Fight Books: www.bossfightbo...
My childhood. I remember this and MegaZeux back in the day. I remember playing other people's levels and making my own back in the 90s. I really miss those days.
My cousin and I used to make worlds on ZZT and mail them to each other on floppy disks, instead of sending each other letters. I wish I still had some of those disks!
I had many fun times with ZZT!
Always great to see another video from you
I spent many many years using ZZT.
It recently came to my attention this month that Epic games, in a rare instance that often falls to GOG, itchio or Steam, has ZZT's registered levels available for free on their platform. Given so many other early titles have dedicated archival or community pages that preserve them in the current age, knowing their first foray is STILL available on Epic itself is incredible.
Now that being said, I feel like the museum of ZZT does a better job celebrating just how important this game and its engine was to a lot of people, but there's something very humbling about Epic making sure to do the same and I felt that was worth bringing attention to. 😊
Hah, that's incredible :) I know that Tim Sweeney knows of the Museum - I wonder if he'd ever come back and write a new ZZT episode, like John Romero did with Doom :)
I had no idea this thing even existed until now. It looks great!
I love these nostalgic videos😊
Really interesting. I had heard of it, but didn't realise what a phenomenon it was.
ZZT was great. My whole family was super into it in the mid-90s. We made some games of our own. My 13 year old brain stumbled through the scripting language, but these days, as a professional program, it makes much more sense.
jazz jackrabbit letsplays coming? You're a DOS god for this review.
Ahh, thank you :) And yes, Jazz Jackrabbit will be coming up whenever I can find the time to reach as far as 1994!
Oh yeah!!! ZZT!!!! One of the best Rush songs of all time!!! Classic! Iconic!!!
Lol... kidding, obviously... but MAN OH MAN does this take me WAAAY WAAAY far back!!! I used to download so many homemade worlds that people would share online... I remember “Kill Barney” world being very popular to make/share for one odd reason or another... don’t ask me. But man is this a nostalgia trip!!
But who is Barney? :)
* * * Merry Christmas Dude * * * _and_ *Have a Happy New Year Too!* _XD_
Thanks, you too!
I love your coverage of early computer gaming culture. :3
While I've been a gamer from a young age, I wasn't really dialed into the culture until later. It's interesting to get a view into a world I missed.
Thanks for saying - that's amazing to hear :) I grew up with these games, but often I discover new things about the teams behind them and how they were all related as I research for the video.
Yeah, I grew up a Nintendo kid AND my only gaming cultural connections were family and a couple of immediate friends. I didn't really get into the wider gaming culture until around the start of Pokemon gen 2, so...
Your videos are really shining a light on things I only vaguely knew about from occasional second-third-fourth hand mentions here and there.
So THAT is where you get your icon for the Stumbling Through series from. Huh. Swanky.
Aha, yes, it was! :)
There's a lot of things the ZZT community has in common with the Doom community. I can see why you gravitated towards both.
Aaahhh... Tyrian... takes me way back.
I just played One Must Fall 2097... you know that game where 90 procent of your background music and sound effects is from regarding to this video.
You can play these kind of games on DosBox or any other DOS emulator.
I don't know if Kroz inspired ZZT, but I seriously wondered if (Caves of?) Thor inspired Super ZZT, with both the wider text mode in a smaller scrolling window and the arrow-water to ride...
Man, this brings back memories.
Some I wish it didn't due to old game-making shame, but oh well. XD
Hah, we all have old game-making shame :) Pretty much all my games have cringey fourth wall breaking stuff and my entire persona at the time was based on the humour level of "Chinese names sound a bit weird".
Old ZZTer here. Now I gotta know what you made! (My biggest was Dungeon Guru Nostalgia 2)
Man, I loved this game back in the day. Even got pretty handy with the editor but never had the time or motivation to finish any of the games I worked on. Joined the Z2 community at some point but, uh, let's just say they were less than welcoming to newbies. Or most people, for that matter. Still, got good memories playing things like the Cannibal Island world and a Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy inspired SZZT world called "Life? Don't Talk To Me About Life!".
That sounds great. Sadly, I came too late to the party and never got to play it or any of the community content.
`The game's freeware so it's not too late ;)
Yes, the community was a giant impenetrable pile of in-jokes (only partially made coherent by zzt.org/zu/wiki/Main_Page ) and a lot of those were really just thinly cloaked nastiness. I never really felt like I fitted in there but I have semi-fond memories of it as the first community that I was ever part of on the Internet! Would be interesting to see any half-finished worlds that you still have :)
Sadly I never made anything substantial enough that I felt they were worth keeping. Most of my worlds only ended up consisting of one room that I quickly abandoned.
Also, "thinly-veiled nastiness" doesn't quite cut it for a community that uses Hitler as a standard emoticon on their forums.
There's a Humble Bundle bundle going right now that has the ZZT book in it.
Back when Epic wasn't only focused on Fortnite... Ah the golden age...
If you look deeper they actually always focused on their engine. Unreal showcase their rendering capabilities, while Fortnite showcase their massive multiplayer performance. Until now Unreal Engine is still one of the best and popular game engine.
Hey David, did you release some old MZX games on dMZX recently? Also, fun to hear someone say it "Zed Zed Tee".
kaikairos I did, a few years ago - my brother @quadralien found a cache of our old games, I dug through and uploaded the most coherent ones, and someone submitted them there :) vault.digitalmzx.net/show.php?id=1511 Most of them were by him and very few are finished, but there’s some of my early work there!
ZZT is the grandfather of RPG maker lol
It really is! A lot of people got their start thanks to it :)
@@DavidXNewton I never got on it back in the day... my first experience with Epic MG was with Epic Pinball... My dad downloaded the full version off some BBS but it took ages and cost nearly £200 in premium rate call time. On the plus side though, my mum played it for easily 5000+ hours and broke at least 4 keyboards playing it... The keyboards were only £3 each at the local computer fair though.
The other plus was that my dad didn't access BBS through premium rate numbers after that... Such a prominent memory.
Nostalgia over pop.exe brought me here and you're videos are fantastic and I like your humour... keep it up. You got my sub!!
8:12 - That castle looks like the castle from Atari 2600 Adventure. :)
Ha, it does! Wonder if that was a deliberate reference :)
@@DavidXNewton It's also the correct color, too.
Red Alert? Didn't I play that one?
As someone who is trans, I appreciate the recount of Anna's book and am likely going to purchase a copy myself.
W. A. Stokins That’s great :) I ended up straight/cis so I can’t fully relate to trans people’s experience, but it’s a great account of her thoughts and feelings as she met these people outside her sphere of friends locally.
Vinyl better waifu than Jill.
A wonderful video, and while the book by Anna Anthropy is an interesting account, I sure do wish it showed more of the games or the community in general than just themself, as I found that it didn't really reflect the way most of the community interacted. It's rare to see a non-fiction book about a video game end up having a Mary Sue character, but somehow that one nailed it.
I was hoping to read more about usenet newsgroups, #darkdigital antics, communicating through ZZT monthly magazines with "letters from players" sections, the way friends formed companies and traded programmers back and forth between them, 24HOZZTs, MegaZeux, odd community fanfiction like the AKWare Chat/Bus/Dumptruck, pivotal tools like STK or games like Burger Joint that changed the culture from that point onwards, and so on... and instead ended up with a weird self-biography about how they became a teenager and decided that everything was problematic. It's not really a book I'd personally recommend unless you're into that.
I was expecting more about the technical background of ZZT from the book, but the personal experience that I got instead was revealing to me as well. I skimmed back through the last few chapters and found that there was actually more about the unintended ZZT discoveries than I remembered, the +i flag and the way that other authors manipulated this strange environment. Was the way that they mentioned their transgender discovery the problem for you?
No, it was just how it somehow ended up as feeling like the sole purpose for the book existing while not mentioning 99% of ZZT/ZZT Community related events. If the book were titled "One person's time growing up in the 90s" then at least I would have expected that, but as it stands, it felt odd to ignore so much of the subject. It'd be like picking up a book about, say, Nintendo's history and cultural impact, and having the author mostly end up writing about how playing Mario made them hate plumbers and why the author decided to join a cult, with the focus of the book being about their own life.
Sure, it's kind of interesting to read about that, but it's not really what I'd expect from a 'History/Impact of Nintendo' book.
@@TangoBunnie I left a review on Amazon complaining about exactly what you outlined and they removed it a few years ago.