Most Viewed Museum Pages of 2024
What site pages saw the most traffic?
Every time I've done this, it's always been the same goof where like eight of the ten entries are random letters that happened to be on top of the list. That's boring.
This time, letters are excluded to widen the net a little.
- 1999 - Certainly a good year for ZZT. No idea what would make this one so popular over others though.
- Play Online - Bulbasaur's Online Pokémon RPG Randomizer - Laughing all my way to the bank for another year. This is not the "Pokemon Randomizer" as we think of today. Sorry kids.
- 1993 - I... have no idea why this year specifically either. It has Janson's classics, but if I were looking for Janson's classics, I'd just look up Janson.
- 1998 - I know better than to pick a year as the "best year of ZZT", but back when I didn't, I would have said 1998. It's got a lot of bangers. Was it the glory days? Or was it just the days where I first showed up?
- About ZZT - If you don't know, you don't know. Folks needs to find out what ZZT is and why it's so gosh darn cool.
- New Releases - Getting those hot new files that just got published. All those modern goodies in one place.
- Roulette - A non-committal sampling of ZZT worlds. IMO the best way to find a ZZT world that gets your attention if you really have no clue what kind of world you'd like to sample.
- Uploaded - Getting those hot new files when they're so hot, that the author has yet to notice they forgot to #SET VICTORY after the Shadow Lord boss on level three has been defeated, necessitating a re-upload before publication.
- Search - Cross your fingers and hope the Museum has the game you remember loving or that game you made and don't remember publishing. You could be the next success story!
- The Front page - Welcome 2 my website :)
And instead of cluttering the list with letters, here's all twenty-seven (yes) letters in competition with one another:
- 1
- U
- Y
- X
- V
- Q
- G
- O
- H
- P
- J
- E
- I
- N
- W
- K
- T
- F
- M
- C
- R
- D
- L
- B
- Z
- A
- S
Most Viewed Files of 2024
What files were the most popular to peruse?
- The Misadventures of Mega Job: The Epic Tag Team - Tseng's final ZZT game from 2001. Part-time pro wrestlers and part-time crime fighting duo, Mega Job rescue the mayor's daughter. I hear the content of this one is a tad spicy, but Tseng's games have been overall enjoyable to me personally.
- Legend of Brandonia - Riegs's classic ZZT adventure where sir Alex must rescue a dragon's eggs from the evil knight Acro.
- Zuzatan: The Forgotten City - A new game for this year! authorblues's La-Mulana inspired puzzle adventure has you uncover the secrets of a lost civilization, and save humanity in the process
- Cyber Purge v2 - The Green Herring's updated and highly stylish action title where inhabitants of a VR world "Paradise" need to be saved from the Death Seal, a virus which causes a fatal electrical shock to be delivered to those who dare disconnect from the network
- The Color Eraser - Vacek's match three engine in ZZT. Shoot matching colors to the one you've selected to clear the screen.
- Scooter - gerbil's cute little platformer that sets a tiny guinea pig off a grand Lemmings-esque adventure.
- It's The End Of The World! - Iconic ZZT world of the mid-1990s by Creator. A giant meteor is on a collision course with Earth. Are you a bad enough dude to rescue the president and pilot an experimental ship to save the planet?
- Corrupt Mind - AKNeutron's adventure about repairing his own brain by entering the five sections patching things up while there's still time!
- Dragon Eye - mini_maul and qndeb's RPG in which wizards fuse their servants together to create the ultimate wizard. It goes bad. And now it's up to you to right some wrongs.
- ZZT - Still arguably the best starting point for newcomers, Tim Sweeney's original ZZT worlds offer a blend of entertaining action and puzzle solving that set the baseline for ZZT and inspired countless ZZTers to try their hand at making their own creations.
Why these worlds in particular? Well, six of the ten are marked as featured worlds since they've won historic awards from the community. These have the potential of showing up on any page, making it easy to get eyes on them. I think this is the year where I change up what gets displayed in that corner because while I do enjoy Tseng games and Scooter and such, I would much prefer getting folks to see newer creations if they're diving in. We'll figure something out.
The others are all relative new meaning they've shown up on social media promoting them, giving folks quick links to see them for themselves, and good old ZZT itself is gonna be a good starting point in general.
Most Played Files of 2024
What files were people playing from their browser?
- ZZT Crashopedia 0.333 - kristomu's impressive reference guide on every way to cause ZZT to crash that is currently known. Very thorough and ideal for an easily refreshed page rather than having to reopen ZZT with each example.
- Octagon - wayward's puzzle game from 2000. I've only heard good things, but haven't actually played it. "Octagon will surely be a game that will remembered for some time." says a 2002 review by Commodore, who has been proven correct.
- Kill Barney - An unknown author, and one of oh so many ZZT games about eliminating the purple dinosaur. A staple of early 90s Internet humor. Apparently still popular today.
- GATTACA - Dogbert's 1999 action game that I have never heard of until looking it up now. A Star Trek inspired sci-fi adventure.
- Treasure Island Dizzy - One of Nadir's ports of the Dizzy adventures to ZZT. Now with less cracked shells and more chill gameplay instead. I'm a fan of this ZZT series, and if the originals turn you away with their difficultly, there's a real nice vibe to these.
- Mined Out - Lord Igsel's 1999 puzzle game about carefully plotting your path through a mine field. A rare instance of the illusion bug being employed for gameplay purposes to hide the mines from players.
- ZZT - Yeah. You should play it. Again, four classic action puzzlers that are all still a treat today.
- Da Hood - Tseng's first hit, featuring the introduction of oh so many characters that would become staples of his games. RPG battles packed in individual objects as you beat up everyone in town.
- Sisyphus - This is one of mine, and I'm very worried that it's on this list, let alone so high. I think this may be misplaced SEO in action. Have fun walking an endless ping-pong-path.
- Bulbasaur's Online Pokemon RPG Randomizer - Once and always the king. What you expect: Something to patch a ROM to shuffle up locations, movesets, evolution data, and all kinds of variables in Pokémon games. What you get: An object that points at random text labels of gen 1 Pokémon names for a roleplaying group back in 1999. ZZT taking on the role of Visual Basic.
Full disclosure: Hollow Knight: Silksong, a 2022 April Fool's Day upload isn't that much lower on the list. SEO works.
Most Viewed Articles of 2024
- Player's Manual - Covering downloading, launching, and playing ZZT worlds
- Modern Treasures - A second collection of recommended worlds, this time focused on games created after the renewed interest in ZZT post-Museum launch.
- ZZT Cheats - Historically, ZZT worlds were made by young authors with little to no game design experience. As such, bugs are frequent and poorly balanced worlds are common. Fortunately, ZZT's cheats allow players to make the best of a number of common bad situations.
- We Are Still Out Here - A summary of what has happened with the ZZT community since z2's decline up through 2020. This one is linked in the final news post on z2, guiding returning ZZTers curious what happened to the old site to its successor.
- ZZTing With Zeta - Another help world, showing the setup of the Zeta emulator and how to use it.
- Closer Look: Z-Files - Toolkits are a very unique feature to ZZT, and to outsiders, some of its strangest looking boards. This article goes through every toolkit in Nadir's toolkit compilation world explaining their purpose, and why so many exist.
- The Best of ZZT - A guide for newcomers to dive right in to various classic ZZT worlds, focusing more on older titles that were popular back in the day and pointing out a few prominent names, companies, and community awards that imply some level of quality.
- ZZT-OOP 101 - For those taking their first steps into creating things with ZZT, this comparatively modern beginner's guide goes over all the commands, some of their quirks, and depicts examples all on a single easy to reference page. I've had a number of people say this page was a valuable resource for them, and it remains one I'm the most proud of.
- ZZT Versions - If you take a look at downloading ZZT from the Essentials heading, you'll wind up here, learning about 3.2 and a few other variants. This article desperately could use an update actually.
- About ZZT - If you're coming into ZZT with no knowledge of what it is, this is where you'll find your explanation. As people discover ZZT via new releases on Itch, curiously joining Worlds of ZZT livestreams, or seeing bot posted boards shared on social media, this is where they head for answers.
