The people who run oldgame.cz (English link) emailed me and outright asked if we’d link to them. Imagine that, an honest request without any exchange of money involved! Someone just offering to give me something to post about today. It’s a thing of beauty, it is it is.
Honestly I don’t know that much about them, but the page says you can play DOS games in your browser there. I know they’re not the only people who offer that (heck, the Internet Archive even does it), but the barest examination of their site doesn’t show any intrusive ads, paywalls or scammy behavior, so I’m happy to give them the link.
Of course, I reserve the right to remove the link later if they suddenly morph into Trantor the Malware Demon. But barring that, please enjoy!
While it’s seen more than one revival since its original release by New World Computing (the Heroes of Might & Magic series, and the 2008 series titled King’s Bounty by Katauri Interactive), that first version is still a fine game to play even today. Players explore four continents raising armies, fighting hordes of monsters, building income and leadership, collecting artifacts and bringing a variety of colorful villains to justice.
The game simulates the passing of time, which affects a number of things. Every week (five game days) you get income from the king of the realm, but also must pay your troops and other miscellaneous expenses. There is a time limit (determined by the game’s difficulty level), preventing you from passing weeks for income. While you’ll probably fight hundreds of battles in a typical game, technically speaking you can win without fighting any: bringing villains to justice earns you pieces of a map, a depiction of one screen of the game’s vast scrolling area, and the win condition is to find that screen and search for a lost scepter on its center location. While the maps are the same every game, nearly all the locations of the wandering monsters, treasures, villains and other important elements are randomly placed each game, giving King’s Bounty tremendous replayability.
A true classic strategy wargame, King’s Bounty was widely ported, to DOS, the Mac, the Atari ST, even to the Commodore 64 (that must have been a difficult job), and there’s also a surprisingly good rendition for the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive that might be the best version, and was implemented in-house by New World Computing themselves (they did a similarly great version of Might & Magic II for that system).
Dan Heskett has recreated the engine of King’s Bounty and put the code on Github. You’ll need the files of the original DOS disks to use his code, but if you don’t care to go that route you can instead play it in your web browser. The keys are the same as the DOS version; use this PDF of the manual to learn how to play. The Github Readme has a wealth of information, not just on how to build the recreation but of the internals of King’s Bounty. It even includes two autoplayers, one that simulates a game as a human would play it, the other a game played with perfect knowledge of the game world.
Note: I have noticed a couple of bugs in this project. I am giving this project the benefit of the doubt that it was not generated by an AI system. If I discover otherwise, I will mention that fact here.
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
Presenting Wigglewood here is kind of a cheat, I suppose. It has the aesthetic of an old VGA MS-DOS game, with voice acting supplied on CD-ROM, but it’s really more of an animated fantasy cartoon. Its DOSness is more of a stylistic choice than something that really connects it with the world of interactive eclectic electronic entertainment (with the slightly fitting acronym IEEE).
But they’re fun anyway, and if I’m breaking the rules I was the one who set them to begin with. Here is The Quest, which finally advances whatever flimsy plot this series could be said to have. (2 minutes)
So the villain the barbarian and wizard are chasing is Wormdahl after all. Funny, although he hangs out with a succubus he doesn’t really seem that evil, even, as this video shows us, he has a vampire friend. He probably should find better friends. (also 2 minutes)
When these two groups finally meet up they’ll probably get into a slap fight, or maybe stub each others toes. I can’t wait.
Is that hyperbolic? It probably is. But the heart wants what it wants, and what mine wants is CP/M for the MOS 6502 processor. Set Side B is a blog about computer entertainment, in all its many forms, and this qualifies in my mind, because it’s not like anyone’s going to be using it do real work. Right?
I found out about it through the (mostly) wonderful blog The Oasis BBS. It’s called CP/M 65, and it was made possible when CP/M’s source was opened in 2022. Wait, maybe I should explain what CP/M is. Sure, it has a Wikipedia page, but I like explaining it.
Output of the DIR command on the C64 with the system disk in the drive.
Gary Kildall created CP/M, “Control Program for Microcomputers,” for the Z80 microprocessor, and it became the first widely-used standard OS for home computing. Its importance and influence cannot possibly be overstated: PC-DOS (later known as MS-DOS) was created as a clone of CP/M for the 8086 processor, meaning, the reason .COM files are still technically considered executables, and why we still have drive letters in Windows 11, are both directly because of CP/M.
A case could be made that, if IBM hadn’t made the IBM PC out of standard parts, making possible the huge market for clone machines, it’d still be a CP/M world today, in some way. It was the first standard OS, one where it ran on machines made by more than one manufacturer. Many of the CP/M machines companies, the Kaypros and Osbournes, are gone now, but they had quite a large niche at one time.
Conway’s Game of Life, for CP/M 65. Because it’s not really a computer until someone’s run Life on it.
Commodore released a CP/M cartridge for the Commdore 64, an amazingly ridiculous and rare package because the C64 used a 6502 processor. The cartridge worked only because it contained a Z80 processor inside itself, and put the 6502 in the system to sleep to do work. It ran much more slowly than other CP/M systems, and on top of that it still had to use Commodore’s 1541 disk drive, a fatal flaw, because it meant that while it could run CP/M software, it couldn’t read the disks that had them, because CP/M’s native disk format couldn’t be read by the 1541’s read heads. (The C128 had a built-in Z80, and the 1571 disk drive that was made for it could read CP/M disks natively, but by that time CP/M was already dying, pushed out by the PC standard and all those clones I mentioned.)
This thing I’m posting about, CP/M 65, has no relationship to that woeful product. It’s a port of CP/M to the 6502 processor. It can’t run Z80 CP/M software. But in all other senses, it is CP/M. What that means is that it has its own BIOS.
CP/M’s BIOS is what allowed its software to run machines made by different manufacturers. The BIOS acted as a translation layer between the hardware and the software. Programs wouldn’t interact with the hardware directly, but instead make calls through the BIOS whenever they needed to use some part of the hardware, like when it needed to access the disk or output characters to the screen. The result was that unless the software was written specifically to take advantage of a computer’s specialized hardware anything extra it had would go unused, but it also meant that a software developer could write one program and, so long as it restricted itself to interacting with the system through that BIOS, it could run on any CP/M machine that could read the disk.
DIR is the built-in CP/M command to report disk contents, but this release contains LS for those with that muscle memory.
CP/M 65 provides such a BIOS for all of its supported platforms, and as a result, while using it will give you a plane-jane, character-mode program, it’ll let you write a program that will run on any of them. Indeed, since this version of CP/M supports relocating executables, its programs can run on a much wider variety of hardware than original CP/M could. You can write a single program that can run on a Commodore 64, VIC-20, BBC Micro, Atari 8-bit, Apple II, KIM-1(!) and, if you can find the incredibly obscure keyboard and disk drive hardware for it or else emulate them, the Super Nintendo Entertainment System(!!).
But on a C64 it shines slightly more than the others, because it has integrated fastload routines, meaning that it gets around the C64’s greatest flaw, its horribly slow disk drive.
So this basically means now 6502s have their own cross-platform version of DOS, or something a lot like it. It has little software, but it does have an assembler, and a version of BASIC, and if you don’t mind writing it on a (pah!) modern computer, you can also write programs for it in other languages.
Behold the PETSCII Mandelbrot set!
If you want to try this wonderfully misbegotten thing, something like Frankenstein’s Monster wearing a ribbon, its GitHub is here, and you can find binary release disk images here. The one with the extension .d64 is the C64 version, and it loads right up in the Commodore computer emulator VICE, although I found out it’ll fail to boot unless you turn on “True Disk Emulation” for Drive 8. But it works! It comes with an assembler and BASIC, and a vi-like text editor, an implementation of Conway’s Life, and even a Mandelbrot set plotter. I kind of want to write software for it!
CORRECTION: Silly me, here I was assuming that CP/M 65 itself was a fairly recent thing, but as it turns out it’s been around for around 30 years!
CORRECTION FOR THE CORRECTION: Well the guy working in this very long Youtube playlist (maybe 31 hours?) created it in 2022, which isn’t 30 years ago. Ah well!
If it seems that a lot of the “niche” items here ending up being about Nintendo things, you’re not wrong. The fact is, lots of people talk about Nintendo, both the Nintendo of old (N64, Gamecube, GBA, DS), the Nintendo of very old (NES, Gameboy, SNES), the Nintendo of very old (Donkey Kong, Game & Watch), and once in a while, the Nintendo of even older than that. They have been making gaming equipment since the 1800s, after all!
With all that Nintendo talk, I’m positively desperate to find non-Nintendo things older than a certain age. And once in a while, I even find them.
That’s what’s served up today, a video list of 11 secret things about the Space Quest games. The absence of Space Quest games in the current era is one of the worst things about it, if there was any DOS-era game series that could stand a comeback that is IT. But in that terrible absence, here is a 27 minute collection, from Space Quest Historian, of interesting things about those games:
Included items:
The Cave Squid in Space Quest II doesn’t actually chase you: it’s a set encounter in a specific location.
In SQ6, in the German and French localizations, designer Scott Murphy rerecorded some lines he spoke as himself, in those languages.
A cheat to skip some of the Scumsoft area in SQ3.
In the Aptitude Test in SQ5, you can either look over the shoulder of another test taker to get the answers… or just answer the last choice for each question. That’ll also get you past that sequence.
Some planet names in SQ5 are obvious jokes, but one of them that seems to be a jab at rival adventure maker Lucasarts is instead (or maybe, also) a reference to the last name of a couple of employees.
A Sarien guard in SQ1, if you talk to them many times, will eventually reveal that they’re a Kings Quest fan, and six points are locked behind this easter egg, making it difficult to score a perfect game without prior knowledge. As it turns out, Ken Williams put this gag in the game himself.
Space Quest Historian insists that the games, in general, were not made harder to sell hint books. Instead, it was to increase the length of the game, as if you know exactly what to do a typical Sierra adventure can be finished in less than an hour.
The Datacorder puzzle in SQ6 wasn’t intended as copy protection. It was supposed to be clued in the game itself, but an oversight meant it was left out of the game, so the clues were printed in the manual.
In SQ5, there was an unexpected case of the game taking it easy on the player. If you don’t complete a necessary puzzle, at the very end, before escaping a spaceship set to self-destruct, the game won’t kill you as a final punchline, but actually put you back for another try.
The Duracell Bunny, better known to US players as the Energizer Bunny, in SQ4… they actually got permission to include the joke, but from the wrong people. Still they were never sued, possibly because the inclusion flew under the owner’s radar.
Rereleases of Space Quest games sometimes changed some of the pop culture references to make them less legally actionable. In all but one case, however, this was done preemptively, and no legal threat was actually made. It was just their lawyers playing it safe. The one time they got a Cease and Desist was when they included likenesses of ZZ Top in the VGA release of SQ1. They fixed this in a novel way: the interpreter program scans the play directory for alternate resource files, and if it finds them, will include them as alternate animations. They “patched” the game for later pressings by putting alternate versions of the singers, shrunk down so far as to be unrecognizable. This seemed to satisfy the group’s lawyers. But the original graphics are still in the game; if the alternate resource files are deleted (or just moved out of the directory), the ZZ Top parody will reappear.
If all of this is interesting to you, I encourage you to watch the video, where all of these things are illustrated in-game, and explained in far greater detail. Look and see!
This is a deep one. As linked by one for the books over on Metafilter, a GitHub user with the username MrWint was looking at the code of the Olympics-like DOS minigame collection “The Games: Winter Edition.” They wondered why it seemed to be impossible to achieve better than a certain score in some of the events. It turns out to be because of failed copy protection checks in most of the versions of the game produced after the initial release. Most of the cracks of that game that can be found on the internet are affected. They even affect two later official physical releases, and GOG’s release, which is a terrible problem for people who bought any of those versions expecting a working game.
If you’ve played it and never been able to score higher than 86.7 meters in the Ski Jump, it’s not you, it’s the game practically gaslighting you into thinking you failed. It’s impossible to land the jump if you’re affected by the bug and have gone that far!
Here’s a tl;dr summary, although the most interesting part of it all is the reverse engineering and description of the problem. But in case you aren’t interested in that and just want the gist:
The original release came with a code wheel copy protection system, and performed a number of checks for the event that the protection was bypassed. A value was created as the result of the check, and was modified and stored in various other places. Each of the events itself checked one of those places against a second, obfuscated copy of the code wheel’s lookup table. If the original wheel check is bypassed, which happens for most of the versions of The Games: Winter Edition now, illegal or legal, those places won’t have the correct value, and the game will sabotage those events during play in different ways.
It’s really sneaky, and as it turns out, it also affects the GOG release of its sequel, The Games: Summer Edition in a similar manner, although cracks of that game managed to fix the sabotaged events.
Foone began her journey in search of the elusive mastermind back at the start of the year, and the thread is still going on. One of the early hacks she made is putting herself into the game as one of the criminals. I think this screen isn’t faked. She made and maintains the Death Generator website, so it wouldn’t even be particularly hard for her I think.
Some notes from the very long thread, which is still going:
Nouns used as verbs encountered: gibberish, chunk.
The game has support for changing the Acme Detective Agency image depending on different seasons of the year.
There is a handheld version of Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego, which is actually a small DOS emulator, here’s the back of its box:
And here’s all of the people you can talk to in the DOS version:
I love this kind of cartoon art style, you (okay, I) don’t see it much anymore, now everything wants to look like anime.
A reference is made a post on Raymond Chen’s (awesome) Old New Thing blog, about a DOS game running under Windows 95 that crashed because it saw too much memory. It handled memory by allocating and allocating and expecting to be told “no” eventually. Windows 95 would keep giving it memory, going to virtual memory, from the swapfile. The program didn’t expect to keep being given more memory, and eventually it overflowed the array it used to keep track of it all. This seems to be the Old New Thing post.
On the world changing beneath the game: the frowned-upon word for Romani (beginning with ‘G’) is patched, the Brazilian currency name was wrong even when the game was released, lots of changed flags, the fall of the Soviet Union changed lots of things.
8-bit microcomputer graphics were, compared to the graphics cards and chips we mostly use today, pretty limited. While machines like the Commodore 64 and Atari 800 allowed for a fully programmable display, not all devices of the age provided for that.
One solution was what I am told is now called semigraphics, which means using generic characters that are pre-defined by the system in combination with each other, piecing together larger images from symbolic building blocks.
ASCII Art, that fading art form created to make imagines on terminal displays, is a form of semigraphic. The IBM PC character set supported semigraphics mostly through its famous Code Page 437, which provided a variety of line-drawing characters , but looking at it it’s evident that it wasn’t intended for general graphic use.
Different platforms from the time varied widely in their support for graphic characters. Let’s take a quick look at what the options were.
Apple
The base Apple II had a very limited character set:
Images in this post taken from Wikipedia
The Apple II’s character offers little opportunity for graphic use. Of course the Apple II is a miracle through and through for being designed almost entirely by one person, Steve Wozniak, and that includes its character set. Note that it doesn’t neglect reverse video, and even has hardware support for flashing characters. Still though, not much you can do with it other than repurpose punctuation and letters.
PETSCII
The PET and successors, by contrast have an excellent character set for makeshift graphics. The image above is of the Commodore 64 version, but the same graphics are used on old PETs, the VIC-20, the Commodore 128, and even the TED-based machines, the Plus-4 and Commodore 16.
While they’re not reflected in the above image, the whole character set can be reversed too. These machines reverse characters by, simply, duplicating the whole set in ROM as negative images.
PETSCII contains:
Four playing card suit glyphs
A decent set of line-drawing characters, with all intersections both sharp-edged and curved corners
Diagonal slopes, diagonal lines and crossed diagonals
Horizontal and vertical lines at different places in the character cells
Frame corners, which combined with the lines can make decent rectangles
Horizontal and vertical bars at several different widths
Half-tone checkerboards and half-character checkerboards (on PET systems these have a single-pixel grain, but on later machines the checkerboard squares are 2×2 blocks)
4×4 blocks in enough combinations that, combined with their reverse versions, can be used to approximate a 80×50 pixel display with plain characters
Symbols for English pound and Pi
PETSCII is one of the most versatile character sets from the time, and you can do a ton with it with some thought and ingenuity. There used to be a Twitter account (in the days before the Muskening) that posted images of robots made out of PETSCII characters. And because the character set is included in ROM, one doesn’t have to create their own character graphics, using up 8K of system RAM to hold them, to have rudimentary graphics. (In fact, the original PET didn’t even support redefining the character set, so PETSCII was all you got.)
ATASCII
Did Atari consciously follow the naming of PETSCII, with their own self-branded ATASCII? Both are riffing off of ASCII, which stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange. So I guess PETSCII, going by Commodore’s own claimed meaning for PET, means “Personal Electronic Transactor Standard Code for Information Interchange,” which is pretty terrible. But the ATA in ATASCII makes even less sense, since ATA obviously is just the first three letters in Atari.
While it has nowhere near the sheer number of graphic characters that PETSCII has, it had a decent number, including line drawing, slopes and diagonal lines and playing card suits. Of particular note is that the Clubs symbol has the same hole in its middle that it does in PETSCII.
TRS-80
Wikipedia doesn’t offer a screenshot chart of all the symbols of the TRS-80 set, but it does an HTML Table display, which the above is excerpted from. The only graphic characters it has are these off 2×3 cells, which are like the 2×2 blocks in the Commodore set but with an extra row. This gives its screen slightly finer resolution.
The TRS-80 had fairly basic graphics, it seems: those characters appear to have been it as far as graphics goes. The page I saw that described its capabilities even had a name for those blocks: squots. I think that’s a perfectly fine name for these kinds of boxes, whether it’s on a TRS-80, Commodore 64 or other machine.
Sinclair ZX-81
The ZX-81 had a very limited character set. While it has checkerboard and 4×4 block characters, their inclusion comes at the cost of an apostrophe, an at-sign, and even an exclamation point.
The following Spectrum removed the checkerboards, but added the exclamation point and apostrophe, as well as a lowercase alphabet. Still no @ though.
DOS Code Page 437
This is the one that most of you probably already know. It has its own version of squots, but they’re incomplete: it doesn’t have quarter-box or squot-grained checkerboard characters, tlhough it does have three forms of half-tone, a rather extra assortment of double-lined box characters, playing card suit glyphs, and a number of unusual characters up above that will be very familiar to anyone who played PC Rogue.
DOS Code Page 437 was in many ways the end of the venerable tradition of character set graphics. Neither the Atari ST nor Amiga had much use for general purpose character graphics, instead choosing to use their sets’ spare capacity for international characters, a noble offering, but less useful for graphic use.
It is worth noting some of the characters in the ST’s set, though:
Some miscellaneous glyphs like arrows, an X mark and checkbox, a bell and musical note, the Atari logo in two characters, a bunch of digital readout numbers, and four characters that seem to form a face. Here, I’ll piece it together for you:
Who might this handsome person be? It’s a little hard to make out at this scale, but it’s intended to be a pixel-art representation of “Bob” Dobbs, icon and symbol of the Church of the Subgenius!
The World Wide Web is now over thirty years old. In that time, more content has vanished from it than remains now, but some of it can still be dredged up from the shadowy archives of the Wayback Machine. This is the latest chapter in our never-ending search to find the cool gaming stuff that time forgot….
I feel sometimes like the kid from The Sixth Sense. That reference probably dates me to an extent, it’s from 1999 which feels like practically yesterday. It’s pretty recent as my references go: I know who Kojak was, and remember M*A*S*H.
I feel like that kid because when I look over the internet, sometimes I see ghosts. The shades of dead games. When something disappears from the web, it’s really gone, there is no corpse and its server leaves practically no trace of its existence. But sometimes signs can be found, like archived client uploads, broken hyperlinks, site snapshots on the Internet Archive, or still-active fansites.
One of those ghosts that flickers into my hazy vision sometimes is the original Neverwinter Nights. Not the Bioware game by that name, which really has very little to do with it. The first Neverwinter Nights was a SSI-produced MMORPG on America On-Line, that lasted from 1991 to 1997, a contemporary of Island of Kesmai, and of WorldsAway,which I’ve brought up here before.
NWN might have been a MMORPG, but it was also a MS-DOS game, and it ran on a modified version of SSI’s Gold Box engine, and (I presume) used the 2nd Edition D&D ruleset. That may have been what doomed it in the long run, for the license expired, and AOL, TSR and SSI couldn’t reach an agreement that would allow the game to continue. It is worthy of note that of those three companies, two don’t exist now, and the remaining one is nowadays nearly a ghost itself. I’m not going to say it happened because they couldn’t reach an agreement on continuing NWN, in fact it probably wasn’t, but it’s a little comforting to think it might have contributed. Two things that are equally disposable, it seems, are old MMORPGs and the hide-bound corporations that ran them.
There is a fansite devoted to the AOL Neverwinter Nights, apparently continuous in existence from the days the game was live. It hosts a fan recreation called Neverwinter Nights Offline, which is not an exact recreation of the original but recreates a large portion. Of course, without other human players inhabiting the game’s world, it’s nowhere near the same. It runs in DOS, so Dosbox might be of some use to you.
There is also ForgottenWorld (no relation to Capcom’s arcade game), a fan-made recreation of Neverwinter Nights. The note on the fansite dates to 2004, but ForgottenWorld still survives, and even has a Discord. I haven’t tried it myself yet, nor the offline version of NWN linked above. That’s because I see ghosts like these all the time, and I cannot devote the time or energy to any of them that they truly deserve. But maybe, you can.
On Neverwinter Nights Offline, there is a series of Youtube videos where aulddragon plays it for four hours. The first video in the sequence follows. Check out that Gold Box combat style!
Ah, it crept up on me, so let me remind everyone that Roguelike Celebration begins today, although until tomorrow it just means they’re opening their social space for awhile. Nicole Carpenter at Polygon wrote a short piece about this year’s conference.
There is an admittance fee, but if you can’t afford it you can also get a free pass! Please consider paying them if you are able though, they do a lot of work every year in putting it together.
Here is the official schedule (linked), below is it presented just as a list of talks, with ✨sparkle emojis✨ around the things that personally enthuse me. ✨Just because!✨
Times given are US Pacific/Eastern. If you think the short times between starts are indicative of short talks, most of them aren’t that short, they have two tracks going on beside each other:
SATURDAY
9:30 AM/12:30 PM: Arron A. Reed, Klingons, Hobbits, and the Oregon Trail: Procedural Generation in ✨the First Decade of Text Games✨
10:00 AM/ 1 PM: Nic Tringali, ✨Abstract Space Exploration✨ in The Banished Vault
10:30 AM/ 1:30 PM: Linas Gabrielaitis, Fictions of Infinity in ✨Geological Finitudes✨
11:30 AM/2:30 PM: Florence Smith Nicholls, Another Stupid Date: ✨Love Island as a Roguelike✨
11:45 AM/2:45 PM Kes, Hunting the Asphynx: Roguelikes, ✨Provenance✨, and You
Noon/3 PM: Mike Cook, Generating Procedures: ✨Rule and System Generation✨ for Roguelikes
1:30 PM/4:30 PM: Scott Burger, The ✨Data Science✨ of Roguelikes
2 PM/5 PM: Nat Alison, In Defense of ✨Hand-Crafted Sudoku✨
3 PM/6 PM: Eric Billingsley, Scoped-down design: ✨Making a Tiny Roguelike✨
3:30 PM/6:30 PM: Elliot Trinidad, Touching Grass & Taking Names: Tuning the ✨Blaseball✨ Name Generator
4:30 PM/7:30 PM: Paul Hembree, Audible Geometry: Coordinate Systems as a Resource for ✨Music Generation✨
5 PM/8 PM: Jurie Horneman, Why ✨Dynamic Content Selection✨ Is Hard
SUNDAY
9:30 AM/12:30 PM: Mark Johnson, ✨Generating Riddles✨ for a Generated World
10 AM/1 PM: Jesse Collet & Keni, Fireside Chat About the Development of ✨NetHack✨
10:30 AM/1:30 PM: ✨Leigh Alexander✨, ✨McMansions of Hell✨: Roguelikes and Reality TV
1 PM/4 PM: Ray, Remixing the Layer Cake: Facilitating ✨Fan Reinterpretation✨ Through ✨Caves of Qud✨’s Modular Data Files
1:15 PM/4:15 PM: Crashtroid, Preventing Ear Fatigue with ✨Roguelike Music✨
1:30 PM/4:30 PM: Everest Pipkin, The Fortunate Isles: Fragment Worlds, Walled Gardens, and ✨the Games That Are Played There✨
2 PM/5 PM: ✨Jeff Olson✨, ✨Alphaman✨: Developing and Releasing a Post-Apocalyptic Roguelike Game in the ✨DOS Days✨ When Computers Were Slow, Memory Was Scarce, and No One Had Ever Heard of Object-Oriented Code
ZZT was (is) an ancient shareware DOS game that runs in character mode, created and published by Tim Sweeney. Originally published by Potomac Computer Systems, a company ran out of the basement of Sweeney’s house, when it expanded its software selection it was renamed to Epic MegaGames, and later Epic Games, under which title it remains today, still headed by Tim Sweeney after all these years. He would go on to create the Unreal Engine, upon which the modern fortunes of the company were founded.
Images from the Worlds of ZZT bot
But back to ZZT, which is still a nifty piece of software, and a lot of fun to mess around with. It included an editor that allowed users to create their own scenarios, which spawned a modding community that survives to this day. Noted game designer and educator anna anthropy wrote a book about ZZT for Boss Fight and she continues to carry its banner today. ZZT scenarios both old and new can be found on the site Museum of ZZT, and every three hours Mastodon bot Worlds of ZZT publishes screenshots from random ZZT adventures.
Because it’s a character-mode game, ZZT modules are often confused with classic roguelike computer games. ZZT is not necessarily a roguelike, but it may be possible for someone to write a classic-style roguelike game in ZZT.
But running a DOS game nowadays is not as easy as it used to be. It requires the use of either a vintage computer system running a compatible DOS, a virtual machine like VirtualBox or Docker, or some DOS emulator, such as DOSbox, a tool for emulating a working DOS system that can run on current OSes, or Zeta, a DOS emulator with just enough features to get ZZT working.
ZZT was written in Turbo Pascal, but its source code had been misplaced by Tim Sweeney and was considered lost, until very recently (the past few days), when a nearly-complete version of ZZT 3.0 was found. Most of it can be downloaded from The Almost of ZZT, on Github, which is that version minus some parts of the source that are considered to be under third-party copyright.
Since it is incomplete it is not useful for compiling a working game, and is presented for historical reasons more than anything. Fortunately, there already exists The Reconstruction of ZZT, a reverse-engineered (with Sweeney’s blessing) version from 2020 that compiles to identical binaries.
ZZT is a subject that deserves much more detail than I can give it in an introductory post like this. Maybe later….
It’s the holidays and we’re trying to make low effort posts for now, so let’s just watch a playthrough of the first Christmas Lemmings disk, released in 1991.
Psygnosis released several of these as free pass-around demos. This one is of the MS-DOS version, and is only about 19 minutes in total. Enjoy the festive yuletide peril!
