With a fresh new start on the patron polls, the winner was clear. Taking a significant lead over the alternatives, TearDragon's (tier? tare?) promise of mid-90s Japanese media inspiration combined with the lost continent of Atlantis for a setting proved irresistible. The people demanded Atlantis, presumably only on vibes. I had never heard of this game before, and haven't come across any mention of it elsewhere. It stands out though, thanks to its title screen written in katakana.
No, it doesn't say Atlantis. The helpful translation below reveals it to be "fantasy", as in Fantasy Software. It is the only ZZT company with non-Latin characters in its name save for Lancer-X's 妹Soft. And just as with For Elise, the game itself is fully in English. These days, I think the number of people who have learned Japanese from a love of anime, games, manga, and Japanese pop culture in general is through the roof. In 1995, going so far as to study Japanese makes TearDragon more of an early pioneer.
The influence of the anime boom of the 2000s in ZZT is fairly subdued, with a lot of ZZTers then dismissing the medium entirely in order to be too cool for it. Atlantis, is to my knowledge, the earliest ZZT world out there influenced by Japanese culture that isn't in the form of a video game.
It's not based on any early licensed property, instead telling an original story with an origin documented in the game's text file of "I saw a special on [Atlantis] in T.V.". I can only imagine what the TV special got into, as the tale TearDragon tells is one of a returning enemy with powerful magics, spirits fusing with humans to become strong enough to defeat said enemy, and some time travel from a ruined future for good measure. Plato would never.
It may sound like a lot, but this is the author's first game, meaning expectations need to be calibrated here. TearDragon succeeds in telling the tale, and excels in the art department, but the gameplay is something I'd describe as breezy if were trying to being polite. Expect surprisingly little shooting for a game about good versus evil, and don't get your hopes up if you want a deep story either.
But don't count the game out entire. Atlantis is no lost classic (more a lost continent). It's still a ways better than a lot of other first releases, making it a very respectable attempt for the era where the artwork helps it punch above its weigh a little bit. Atlantis is able to avoid a fate of being forgotten by history thanks to TearDragon's efforts in adding a number of eye candy scenes with some lovely anime-inspired character portraits as well as a few other solid looking bits of architecture.
While this appears to be TearDragon's only release, it's the sort of game where you can daydream of what might have come next. If their next game's gameplay could catch up to this game's art, they'd really be on to something. Right now, Atlantis is a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there.
Yron's Quest
Atlantis begins with a series of art boards accompanied by scrolls to set the scene. One day an unexpected earthquake rocks the continent of Atlantis, but this earthquake is quickly revealed to only be the beginning of the dangers Atlantis now faces. As will soon be discovered, an ancient evil was sealed beneath Atlantis, and is now free to attempt to conquer it once more.
The continent finds itself being lifted up out of the sea and suddenly floating in the air, with mysterious black towers emerging from the waters around it. Meanwhile, a young adventurer by the name of Yron is out exploring the cave systems as he often does. Fleeing the cave due to the earthquake out of a fear of a cave-in, he returns to the surface to discover the town has taken significant damage.
Fearing the worst, Yron seeks the mayor's house as his daughter Naomi is his girlfriend. An attack on her is enough to send him into a rage, swearing vengeance on ...well, I guess the earthquake at this point. The story falls apart pretty fast if you start asking questions.
But before Yron can figure out how to punch an earthquake, he discovers a number of spirits in the cave who speak with him about what just happened. The leader of which explains that this disaster has been caused by Zymin, a powerful magician who wants to rule over humanity. Zymin had been sealed away after being defeated in the past, now awakened when the earthquake unsealed his tomb. If Yron wishes to save Atlantis, and perhaps the world, from destruction he'll need to travel to temples scattered across the land, collecting crystals contained within, and defeating Zymin's guardians that protect them.
If he can succeed, the sealed palace can be opened, allowing Yron to acquire what is needed in order to defeat Zymin. If not.. then Atlantis's days are numbered ...in a different way.
This is a par for the course setup for a game alright. Travel the world of Atlantis, find temples, conquer foes inside, defeat one of Zymin's guardians, and claim the crystal. Acquire X crystals, and then confront Zymin to save the island. TearDragon however, finds themself in a bit over their head, underestimating how much work is involved of making a game that adheres to such a formula.
Atlantis winds up promising more than it delivers, and TearDragon takes the awkward approach of working around it. The game thankfully tells a complete story instead of panicking and promising a sequel. Yron will fight Zymin before the credits appear. He just only gets to go through a single temple rather than the unspecified number before.
TearDragon doesn't make the obvious edits to just tweak the macguffin into being a single crystal in a single temple. They instead try to create a sense of panic. Returning your single crystal to the spirits leads to a the leader nervously explaining how Zymin is regaining his powers much faster than expected. There's simply no time to collect the other crystals, and it's fortunate that Yron was able to acquire any at all. Yron has to fight Zymin without the full set of equipment, and by this point in the game players are already aware of a timeline where Zymin has succeeded.
I don't know that any game could pull this kind of bluff. If a Zelda came out to today and oops sorry Link you gotta fight Ganon now, forget about those other dungeons (or perhaps go fish up some Triforce pieces). Nobody would believe that was the intended experience. They'd immediately suspect some combination of budget cuts and time constraints. Can you tell a story in a game where you genuinely try to escalate the stakes by having players do less than they were told they'd need to do?
TearDragon may over-promise, but given the quality of the action scenes, and lack of exploration when navigating the the rest of the world, scaling back and getting a finished game out there was definitely the right call. Atlantis winds up taking around a half an hour to get through, certainly more on the shorter side of things. It doesn't outstay its welcome, and at the end it's likely that the only thing players will want more of from the game is to see TearDragon's visuals.
Even if Atlantis is shorter than intended, there's some time is still spent expanding the story beyond the Zymin's unsealing in the introduction. This includes not just some more surprises about how to defeat Zymin, it also includes a subplot about the mayor suggesting something sinister is going on, that disappointingly doesn't get resolved.
The facts of the game, despite being so simple are difficult to really pin down. What the game tells you on one board, will be contradicted on the next, so even what little there is of this may just be a contradiction. After all, this game's opening story shows Yron leaving the cave and surveying the aftermath of the earthquake, and then begins with him talking to some spirits in the cave he just left.
Questionable continuity aside, Yron visits the mayor's summer home and finds nobody inside except for a dying dog (...morbid but you do you I guess). In the main town, he approaches a guard protecting the mayor's primary residence and exclaims that the mayor was killed at the other home, and that his daughter has been kidnapped. Neither of these things have happened.
The guard is very confused by this because both the mayor and Naomi are inside right now, perfectly fine. This, on its own, could be a novel way of tricking the guard into letting you through, allowing you to pass so that your wild claims can be debunked. But there seems to be a bit more to it.
For one, the guard also admits to knowing Yron and letting him in because of who he is, making disproving his claims kind of pointless if he would have just let him in regardless.
The mayor acts friendly to Yron, but direct accusations that he's an impostor lead to the guards being called and the game ending immediately. Playing it a little more cool and saying that you thought he was dead gets met with confusion, and an eventual dismissal that he's a busy man. He tells Yron to just go hang out with Naomi and leave him alone.
And certainly, it could be that this is indeed the real mayor not wanting to debate whether or not he's dead. But the game over, the brushing off questions, and the fact that every mayor in ZZT is always some flavor of evil makes me wonder what the truth is, and what plans TearDragon may have had for this guy.
You can tell that more temples were planned thanks to the game keeping dated dialog intact. Perhaps other cut components of the game were scrubbed clean more successfully.
Also, both Yron's claim and the guard's are wrong about Naomi. She's nowhere to be found. Her room is under renovation, presented in an unsettling and empty manner.
The other room in the house is the mayor's bedroom, with an excellent four post bed. No mention was made by Yron about the fate of the mayor's wife, so is she an impostor? Is she fine and being deceived by a fake husband? Is all of this nothing?
I mean, probably.
More story develops just up the path where one object in particular stands out, as they appear identical to Yron.
Sure enough, this guy is also Yron. He's from the future. Or at least, one possible future. I think it's a Trunks situation.
Future-Yron is rather calm about things, first telling players about the temple that's just up the road, and offering to help you out later. He then nonchalantly drops that he doesn't want this timeline to end up like his, with no further elaboration, or revelation of his identity. He just suddenly teleports away.
Later encounters with Future-Yron do have him offer a little bit of explanation of things, as well as reveal his true identity. TearDragon uses this character to make it clear that Yron's quest is a now-or-never situation. If Zymin can't be defeated soon, his power will only grow until he truly is unbeatable.
As for how Future-Yron travels through time? It probably has something to do with the structure behind me, which is not the temple (he makes it sound like it is), but an experimental machine created by the Doctor to travel to other dimensions.
Yron isn't allowed to touch it, and as is running tradition now, gets a game over if he gets too aggro when asking the Doctor about using it himself. Give someone the ability to create a video game, and they'll quickly wield their power to kill the player. TearDragon is no exception.
Adding to the inconsistencies, Naomi is just standing around here. She was not kidnapped, despite Yron's previous claims.
Okay. She wasn't kidnapped yet. These blue yen symbols on the sides of the board are all Zymin objects, but not all identical in code. It seems to be a mishap of placing tiles, where players are lucky that when the Zymin is meant to grab her, only one of them actually moves, letting the event play out as intended. Yet I don't know what the purpose of so many of them could mean. I'm unsure what players are supposed to see them as because I'm confident it's not six Zymins, and with no description when touched, they're kind of there.
This scene had me wonder if perhaps the order of events was going to play out a bit differently. There's a chance that TearDragon wanted players to witness the kidnapping before they were able to enter the mayor's home, and perhaps at one point the mayor was indeed dead in the summer home early on as well.
Plenty of newer authors finish a game without figuring out how to use flags to ensure a logical order of events, either avoiding the need for such a thing or hoping their breadcrumbs for the player lead them to take the road where it all works out. And yet TearDragon demonstrates that they are capable of this.
Later in the game there are some flag checks, and already by this point players may have picked up an odd rock in the starting area which can be properly used to get a bonus not to far from here.
All these strange inconsistencies do hurt the story of a game that is primarily driven by that story. If players can't trust what they're told, then there's little reason to care about any of it. I found myself second guessing my memory repeatedly, wondering if perhaps I misread dialog or missed something outright.
In reality, this game is incredibly linear, taking players almost exclusively from south to north, save for a few impossible to miss passages for the few buildings that can be entered. Anything the player doesn't see, is simply because it isn't there.
The Forces of Zymin
What is it then that players actually get to do other than accuse the mayor of being a fraud and watch your future self explain that he goofed and let Zymin win?
Not a lot.
TearDragon goes with ole' reliable, handing the player 1000 ammo at the start of the game, and then sometimes getting them to shoot it at some built-ins. It's a first release, and plays like one.
To be clear, that's perfectly fine. Nobody looks down on built-in enemies anymore, and even if they did, there is an instance of some generic "guards" in the temple section that are certainly less engaging than lions and tigers.
Those specific enemies actually take a backseat to what is arguably ZZT's potentially most boring enemy: bears. Their behavior of either sitting still or moving towards the player makes them the easiest target to deal with, especially when not paired with a different threat. Not to mention when players have vast quantities of ammo at their disposal as they do here, you just park yourself somewhere and fire exactly the number of shots needed until it's time to reposition to get more bears to move towards you.
I suppose there's some attempt to shake that up by surprising players with the attack in the first place. Putting the bears on matching colored fakes turns them into a solid blob here, which will catch you off guard when it starts moving, but with more than ample time to realize what's going on and begin shooting.
The post-earthquake Atlantis is hardly as dangerous at the introduction text makes it sound. Watch out for this single tiger that's harassing a villager. LOME had an opening similar to this with its protagonist having to defeat a bunch of tigers before he could enter a town, but LOME this ain't.
Watch out for this single tiger that's hanging out in a building filled with hundreds of gems for the taking. At no point are the gems used for anything, so it's just an excuse for the player to hoover up as many as they can care to. With how much health players are given at the start of the game, not a single gem is actually needed.
More involved fighting will eventually show up when players make it to the temple. The enemy placement remains pretty haphazard, shown in the screenshot where a blob of centipede segments winds up creating one decently sized centipede while the rest of the segments fail to connect adding a mess of loose heads that wind up being the real threat.
The challenge of getting through this many monsters feels like a mistake TearDragon made, not a deliberate decision to have centipedes that love to change directions just before a bullet hit them.
Not everything in the temple is action of course. Yron and the player can't be tough enough to avoid feeling a strong sense of dread when they see twenty-one passages in row. It inevitably means having to guess which passages goes where you want it. The use of identical colors for all of them means ZZT's passage handling behavior will spit players out on the rightmost passage should they guess incorrectly. With no clues to go on, you can only hope the correct passage is on the right half of the screen, as the fastest way to check every passage is to go right from left. Each wrong guess means a longer walk to the next passage to try.
At least, that's the misery intended to be inflicted. For whatever reason, every single passage here leads to the correct destination, making the puzzle a welcome lie.
The objects that block the passages from just one side ask the player if they think this is the right passage before disappearing if Yron says yes. This is another unintentional (and ultimately pointless given the passage situation) win for players that can bypass the prompts by entering passages from the top instead.
Custom guard enemies make an appearance here as Yron ascends a tower to the temple's peak, offering a new obstacle that you can't find in Town. They sit in place and shoot in Yron's direction ad nauseam. It does take a few shots to defeat them, giving them some extra toughness to make them more than just parked tigers or destroyable spinning guns.
The code also has issues. It runs all the :SHOT labels and text together with a single #ZAP SHOT at the end. This causes all the hit text to display in a window at once, which each successive hit removing the top line. A typo in the code also means the guards take one fewer shot to defeat than intended thanks to an errant :SHOOT.
The side-perspective used here isn't enforced either, so Yron can just fly himself to a comfortable spot where he can safely shoot rapidly to take out the enemies with room to react to any bullets heading his way. RIP my immersion.
Towards the end of the game you get one last run-in with the built-ins. It's a perfect illustration of the too many stars syndrome. A number of very aggressive tigers quickly home in on the starting room whose door takes a moment to actually open. Thanks to bugs within ZZT itself, it's very possible a star will get pushed on top of one of the walls and hurt Yron before he can begin to fight back. Expect at least one tiger to go bullet-spam mode due to swapped stats as well.
As miserable as this moment could be, the glut of health and ammo players receive makes it trivial to just run past them to Future-Yron who gives a pessimistic pep talk about needing to beat Zymin now or else suffer the same fate as his timeline, and then open the door to Zymin.
To actually reach Zymin, Yron needs to get that crystal from the game's lone temple, and in order to get that, must defeat its guardian Kamzuki.
Thanks to the game's documentation citing Chris Kohler's Mega ZZT as a utility used, I was able to confirm that Kamzuki isn't a TearDragon original. Kamzuki runs a straightforward loop of moving towards the player and then shooting towards them. Shoot until dead.
Just like built-in enemies, this approach can be perfectly fine if used thoughtfully, miserable if used poorly, and defaults to forgettable.
Forgettable is what we have here. The room is devoid of obstacles to make positioning matter at all. Ammo and health are at a surplus, and the default object speed means you can easily overwhelm them with bullets if you desire, or focus on dodging and hoping for a few shots to make it to their target.
Zymin is an original creation, and plays to TearDragon's strengths better. It's a much more visually interesting fight, with the giant horned head of Zymin looking down at a tiny Yron and smiling a wicked smile.
Letting TearDragon design their own boss though, means once again relying on excessive amounts of stars. Stars that like the tigers seen just before, are better off ignored. This time at least the player needs to shoot. Future-Yron tells you Zymin has a glass jaw, hinting at where to aim, though it's not like there are many other spots you can shoot.
The two spiked towers repeatedly throw stars, as do the sides of Zymin's jaw. It's a steady stream that doesn't get out of hand. Zymin goes down very quickly solely because his weak point is constantly vulnerable. Players will have more than enough health to stand still and hold down the fire button, but even as I was unsure if there was a specific spot on the jaw I needed to hit, I only got hit three times shimmying around to shoot the entire jawline
It wouldn't be enough to impact the fight at all, but the inner portion of the jaw is also made of fakes, which mean when the side components try to throw stars towards the player, there's a 50/50 chance as to whether they'll throw south where the star can reach them, or into the mouth where the star can't do anything.
Pretty Pictures
Atlantis features a story that might be interesting if there was time to explore it, as well as some consistency to make it easily comprehended. It also features uninspired if decently playing action sequences. These on their own won't win over most players, which would see Atlantis falling into the very crammed bucket of forgotten ZZT worlds. Worlds neither weird nor broken nor surreal enough to stand out in spite of their weaknesses, nor impressive enough to be remembered for their quality.
But of course the game has an ace up its sleeve that I've been purposely keeping out of focus, saving it as a final treat to hopefully get folks at least a little curious about Atlantis, without needing to watch a TV show about it first.
TearDragon's biggest success with the game is through their artwork, the secret ingredient that makes the run of the mill a lot more enticing.
Players get to be wowed by it almost immediately after starting the game. The opening intro presents players with this gorgeous shot of the island being lifted into the air while Zymin's enigmatic black towers casting dark shadows over the water.
The look here is an unusual one, and it took me quite awhile to figure out exactly why. At first I thought perhaps TearDragon was making the most of faux-STK elements, building from colors not selectable in the editor itself, but able to be produced via ZZT-OOP to #CHANGE elements like ammo or torches into other things to get dark cyan or brown. The sort of colors you see in 1992's Tim's Toolkit.
But it's certainly more than that and producing spaces with text to get solid walls of dark colors. There are colors only acquired through STK here. The grass shows far too much texture when your options are bright green, solid dark green, and black on dark green via transforming forest.
Let's look at some more boards before I point out the peculiar restrictions TearDragon's art adheres to.
Their skills at portraying people surpass an already high bar from the landscapes. It's here that you realize the art is definitely anime inspired, with Yron depicted with spiky shiny hair and an outfit suitable for piloting mecha.
The posing here is really impressive for a ZZT game in 1995. Yron's flexed arm is a far more complex and well executed pose than any other 1995 contemporaries I could find. The red highlights of his clothes help keep the anatomy in check, while the height difference between him and Naomi make the angle of the shot feel deliberate. This is no cookie-cutter human shape tweaked to turn one character into another. These are two people with very different appearances, that clearly read as people, and entirely devoid of objects to create more gentle angles.
It's certainly a much more compelling way to start the game than poor old Mister Hero, a game with an identical release date. Yron's arm looks like it can be moved as needed, unlike a stiffly positioned action figure, such as the protagonist of Creatures of the Neon Moon. Yron appears to be a living breathing person, not a facsimile of one scribbled in the editor.
The best I could find for other art in 1995 (admittedly a search based on vibes of whether a game might have character art to compare to) is a pretty good Homer Simpson in a much less dynamic side view, and the ending of Warlock Domain, featuring a perfectly symmetrical man stabbing at a demon. TearDragon is absolutely ahead of the curve here. If you told me this board was from Agent Orange's Metal Saviour Bia, an anime-inspired game made twenty-five years later that aimed to replicate the style of these "discovered STK midway through development" game, I'd have no reason to doubt.
Still, though, some odd stylistic choices. Full access to STK, and the skin tones used are Bart Simpson yellow and Yiepiepi white.
Skipping over some of the game's finer art may have also meant overlooking some bits of plot.
This large lad is OMEGA, the protector of Atlantis. He's just hanging out in the cave Yron leaves at the start of the game. The spiky-headed protagonist was a pleasant surprise, but entering this board in a preliminary playthrough to get an idea of what I would be getting myself into got me to immediately quit the game so as not to spoil myself of any more surprises.
OMEGA emphasizes Yron's quest to get the crystals and defeat Zymin. Promising that once all the crystals are collected, he can regain his power and fuse with a human once more as he did thousands of years ago to stop Zymin the first time.
Big circular gemstones adorn his... okay I'm not sure. I see OMEGA here as not having any visible arms or legs. He's cool as heck though, and his mouth even moves as he speaks! We're 3D talking in the 90s!
Buildings join landscapes, anime protagonists, and bulky djinn-like spirits for what TearDragon can sculpt to an impressive degree.
In this case, it's entirely for the sake of having something neat for players to gawk at for a moment. As the path to the temple has a scientific research building that helps make the Doctor's transporter seem a little less odd to just have in the middle of the road.
The interior has researchers fiddling with a giant microscope. (A macro-microscope.) The first thing that I'm not impressed with visually in the game. It does feature some animation at least, with the researchers moving back and forth to get samples and set them in place to be studied.
The brief disappointment is quickly forgotten when Yron heads up to the observation deck where a twinkling star and suddenly night sky show off some much more aesthetically pleasing architecture than your brutalist gray cubes that make up far too many ZZT buildings.
More plot and art overlap arrives thanks to the game needing to re-scale itself around only having a single temple. OMEGA is old news, and won't be strong enough to defeat Zymin with just one crystal. He is brushed aside in favor or a new spirit to fuse with named YRON.
Take a moment to grapple with this game featuring Yron, Yron (from the future), and YRON. And YRON is sometimes just written out like Yron rather than in all caps like OMEGA was. If this story had managed to continue, things might have gotten confusing.
Names aside, it's another great design for some kind of spirit warrior with a big sword.
Even when the detail suddenly vanishes, as when you get a good look at Zymin's face before the final battle, you can still recognize the quality just in carving out a good silhouette for a villain with a skeletal face that says "evil". My only real complaint here is that I wish the rest of the board wasn't also line walls. It kind of sours the powerful choice to use them to construct a face.
And then there's the previously seen fight scene. This looks even better than what was seen before, though I wonder why there are two different designs for Zymin right next to each other...
The spiked towers are a great way to make the arena more imposing and less generic than the green rectangle used for fighting Kamzuki. Integrating them into the fight as a threat is a nice alternative to them simply being decorative objects.
And the horned-skull of Zymin is quite the skull too.
Finally, a sadly unused board features an excellent alternate title screen. One that actually says the game's name rather than focusing entirely on writing the katakana. The decision to go with the company title exclusively for the title screen is certainly an odd one. For it to not be followed by this is even stranger. I suspect the poll results wouldn't have been all that different if this had been the screenshot for Atlantis used.
—
Well, that's all the art I'd like to talk about, so that brings us back to what it is about the graphics that make give the game such a strange appearance.
Rather than use everything available, TearDragon limited themself to a tiny subset of STK boards, and the ones they chose were probably not what people would go for first.
Nearly all the art in this game is made out of forests, not normal walls. Infamously, STK didn't cover every element completely with its color selection, eventually leading to Chronos30's More STK. What TearDragon had to work with was this:
It's a very tiny sampling of the 256 color combinations available for other boards. (Why Janson did this is unknown.)
The other elements that get special colors are passages and certain fake walls (oh and future Yron). This also matches up conveniently with another STK board:
For whatever reason, only these two boards were used in creating all the artwork for the game. This is fairly confirmable in the game itself, which while Super Locked, does still hide remnants of former board titles in the unused bytes allocated for them. Blank boards include cut off text containing "s, Passages, Floors"; ", Torches, more"; and strangely, "creenY T. VANVRANKEN" suggesting that STK's title screen was imported at one point.
There are several other blank boards in the world as well, whose secrets are likely to going be forever unknown. The Mega ZZT board with the boss used for Kamzuki is a likely candidate for one. The rest could be anything, including scrapped content for Atlantis itself. After all, this game was supposed to have considerably more temples!
Considering the extra limitations here, though easily avoidable, I think they make the game's excellent graphics for the time even more impressive. For whatever reason, TearDragon held themself back, and despite that was still able to produce one of the nicest ZZT worlds of 1995.
Final Thoughts
Atlantis winds up being a strange game indeed. TearDragon shows up, drops this one off, and is never seen again, even though the credits mention a sci-fi game named "TERRA X" and plans for a yet unnamed third game.
It's certainly playable. The few instances where stars would get out of hand are no problem with all the health you get. The adventure inevitably feels very rushed and very much redesigned as you go. The game's first act feels promising, providing Yron with a quest that the author sounds like they can deliver on, and a bit of mystery about the mayor's true identity. The presentation of all this has no real issues. The non-art boards still look nice, and there's some originality in having players go through a town post-earthquake, even if there's not much to do there. I suppose when most of the town's structures have collapsed, there's little opportunity to add business, libraries, schools, or whatever else the town might have had.
But there is opportunity to add in some more NPCs. Nobody seems concerned about the earthquake's effect, or that their island is now floating in mid air. Only Yron has any clue what's going on, and he's not about to tell.
The game has some real problems with wanting to kill the player. The guard outside, the mayor, the doctor, and even another guard outside the town who will turn everything on screen into tigers if you insist on passing him. It's amateurish. There's no getting around it.
Except how many ZZT games, let alone ones from the mid-1990s aren't? TearDragon definitely deserves praise for the beautiful character designs and managing to keep the game's issues to ones that can easily be skirted around. The lone temple isn't a bad start, with non-rectangular board layouts like a primitive attempt at what something like Overflow excels at.
Playing the game now, the anime influence is obvious, and gives Atlantis a claim to fame that stands the test of time. It feels different, and certainly looks it too. TearDragon's design can be a bit shaky perhaps, but it's clear that they're thinking about things that a lot of new ZZTers wouldn't. The temple's room layouts as well as a giant talking OMEGA conveying information in a much more exciting manner than touching a smiley face both show a real spark of imagination I can only wish continued to be nurtured. (Hopefully it was outside of ZZT at least).
It's a fair enough little ZZT world with some unique aspects that make it something worth visiting as a historical piece at least. You won't have to break any cheats to enjoy the experience, and even if the game can't quite decide on its own canon, there are some interesting pieces here and there. Atlantis gives ZZTer's today a glimpse at the kind of media that would become commonplace years later. Here, it's still in its infancy, making it curious artifact that aspires to be more than another Zelda or Mario, an artifact worth at least taking a bit of a look at today.
