ZZTV 3

"A big ZZT soup" is a good way to put it. These worlds are a melting pot of the ZZT culture of their time.

The DarkFLR era of ZZTV always includes a menu in this style, with the player selecting buttons on a large TV remote to switch to the channel of their choosing. Despite the channels being TV channels, they were always prefixed with a pound sign as if they were actually IRC channels, the chat medium of choice for ZZTers.

DarkFLR brings up the toughest part of making a ZZTV world: having to wait on submissions. Normally it was safe to abandon your ZZT creation mid-development all you wanted, but the group nature of ZZTV meant that you'd be holding up everyone else if you didn't officially cancel.

The time between volumes varied wildly. Volume 2 to volume 3 was a four month gap, a pretty short time frame compared to ZZTV 10's extremely troubled development cycle which came out SEVEN AND A HALF YEARS after the previous release and is full of then-ancient content (like some art dated from 2005). Unsurprisingly, the release dates match up pretty well with the overall activity of the ZZT community, bustling in 1999, steady in the early 00s, slowing down after 2003, and then just dropping off the face of the earth for several years.

DarkFLR hints that his channel has important information on the future of the project (looking for somebody to take over), and I can't blame him when he's made the first three volumes all in a single year.

The general concept is explained, with a plea to keep sending in your channels. There's also a mention of an "independent" channel, but I don't believe this was ever a thing, as nobody just submitted a single board.

DarkFLR's website, THE DARK PLACE is somewhat available on the Internet Archive, alas the ZZTV page is not.

Our first channel is DarkFLR's own #Gothic ways. This channel name is reused in every one of his ZZTV volumes, with original content each time. Most ZZTers opted to pick a new name with each release.

Are you ready to read a teenagers rants?

This is an odd layout for this sort of board. Channels are frequently full of text, but usually make accessing it not involve long walks across boards. Most ZZTV volumes take up multiple ZZT files, and several take advantage of ZZT's ability to display external text files as a way to keep file sizes down while still including large amounts of text.

I do like the curved road though. Diagonals are hard enough, but this is a pretty respectable curve DarkFLR was able to draw here.

The two buildings are unlabeled and the joke is that the player will ask for interviews at the rant building, and rants at the interview building. Thankfully there is only one rant. Please do not feel obligated to read it.

I was expecting it to be about kids in school that want to smash the system, but sure enough it's an artifact of ZZT's history with IRC drama and complaining about the endless spin-off channels people would make in hopes of getting people out of #darkdigital, the main ZZT IRC channel of the late 90s.

The interview with Daemon_Lotos is far more interesting than IRC squabbles. It spends a lot of time discussing the development of ZZT clones of the late 90s, including his own work with ZZ3, Aetsch's ZIG, and Wep's ZZT++.

ZZT++ was a C++ remake and improvement, acknowledging the need to get away from MS-DOS, though several years before ZZT's DOS ties would start becoming an issue. ZIG got a very thorough article itself, but ZZ3 is a fresh topic here.

It's written in QBASIC, which is... probably a bad sign for it having ever had a chance of being a suitable "replacement" for ZZT. Lotos takes a moment to dis on MegaZeux, whose issues in the 90s are covered in that ZIG article as well. I love the stress test of renaming a video to force the program to try and load it as a ZZ3 world and making sure it doesn't crash from using too much memory.

Heading to the next section of the channel is this cute ad for ZZT Piano, a program (that will not run on a modern computer) that displays a piano and clicking on its keys transcribes the note to ZZT's #play format for music. The board is a pretty accurate representation of what the program looked like. Not surprisingly though, it wasn't all that practical as playing a piano by moving a mouse cursor and clicking each note is not going to let you get an idea for what a song will actually sound like.

It still got some use though! Once in awhile you'll find a ZZT board generated by the program with an object containing the music in the center.

Meanwhile here in the channel, the object blocking the passage has no code and the player has to cheat to proceed. I'm going to guess this was a case where ZZT deleted the code, but the lack of testing isn't a good sign.

The second ad is for a search engine service for ZZT games. I'm not sure if this was meant to be an alternative archive (by this point zzt.org was established and the dominant site to upload worlds to.) Sadly, this one doesn't seem to be preserved anywhere, and I'm really curious if it was a database or just a manual list or what.

Breaking form from the previous ads is one for a ZZT game called Black Metal, which went unreleased. Unsurprisingly, channels are full of previews (some playable, some not) for countless games that never got finished.

This was a world being made after Draco's infamous Teen Priest 2, which had some calling for the game to be banned due to how graphic it was. Edginess and shock value was a big selling point, so drawing an ad of somebody's head having been blown to bits like the board actually depicts probably stirred up some genuine interest.

Lastly is DarkFLR's farewell to the ZZTV project. I'm glad he recognized that he had really come up with something here. I can't imagine he'd have thought it would have lasted more than a decade after he left the project.

It would have been very easy for this volume to be the final one. For him to request people still send him channels to be forwarded to the next host was a very good call to keep the momentum going. Even with changing hands, the next volume would continue to grow in size with two more channels than this one.

I love him complaining about how long it takes to get releases out when he put out three in a year. He's a bit modest as well, even if it comes from a belief that it's the contributors rather than the host of the compilation that made the project a success.

Getting burnt out was to be expected, especially as the releases grew in size. The process of actually assembling one of these things takes a lot of effort. There's no way to stitch together all the files received into one world, which meant DarkFLR (and subsequent hosts) would have to open each submission, export every single board, then import them into the compiled world. Even then, the host has work to do ZZT strips board exits and passage destinations when you export a board, meaning that every connection in a channel had to be redone by hand, updating each passage and connecting any boards. There's a ton of tedious work involved, and with later releases, a need to try and balance out file sizes between worlds as well since it would be far too much to put in one file. This three releases per year thing was doomed from the start.