Throughout the 2000s, the most common solution to this was to use DOSBox and emulate MS-DOS, though this wasn't without its troubles. Having been released in 1991, ZZT is an MS-DOS program that modern OSes can't run on their own. The community has kept ZZT relevant for so long making enhanced editors such as KevEdit with native support for undocumented and unintentional features of ZZT as well as quality-of-life improvements such as copying/pasting of code and elements, object libraries, gradient generators, and other helpful features. ZZT has seen puzzles, adventures, rpgs, platformers, dungeon crawlers, among others. If you've ever played Unreal, Gears of War, Fortnite, or countless titles running on iterations of the Unreal engine, that experience is owed to that little white on blue smiley face that picked up purple keys all those years ago.Įmpowered with the ability to create games and other worlds with ZZT's editor, its community produced more than 3000 titles since 1991 creating games of nearly every major genre. ZZT's financial success allowed Tim Sweeney to continue funding game development and growing Epic into the major gaming company that it is today. These worlds developed in complexity over time taking a language with seemingly limited functionality and allowing it to be used to create complex "engines" such as producing procedurally generated dungeons, RPG battle systems, inventory based adventures, and even generating fractals. Over the past thirty years people of all ages have created ZZT worlds thanks to the incredible accessibility of ZZT's editor and scripting language. On a surface level the language allows basic functionality to display text to have objects move and shoot to test basic conditions and most importantly for objects to send signals to other objects to jump to different labels in their code. The scripting language known as ZZT-OOP is notable for being incredibly simple to use, allowing people without programming backgrounds to create games. This editor allows players to create their own ZZT worlds utilizing numerous built in elements for items, creatures, terrain, and a scripting language that allows "object" elements to be programmed. ZZT found success from its inclusion of a built-in editor available even to those who only had the shareware version of ZZT.
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