♦ Stream Contents ♦
• (3:49) "Groovey Games" by gerbil (1999) [https://museumofzzt.com/file/view/groovey/]
• (13:09) "Gay Denny's II: Metamorphosis" by Nny (2000)
• (18:04) "Untitled" by Benco (2000)
• (44:38) "Shifters" by Cait Sith (2000)
• (55:41) "Caterpillar" by Ian Huisken (2000)
The last Wildcard game (saved for the holiday) and the start of a brand new series. Introducing 24 Hours To Go, a series that aims to play through (nearly) every game submitted to a 24 Hours of ZZT competition, a popular late 90s/early 2000s contest format where entrants were given a topic at the start of a 24 hour period and had to make the best game they could in a single day. Many of these games have been overlooked due to their availability only being in large compilations whose works are not well documented.
As I play these games, I'm taking notes on names, authors, and companies to better catalog these worlds and see what surprises they have in store for us, and this first set was full of them!
To bridge the Wildcard streams with this new series, I opted to play the Summer 2000 contest entries first as only a third of them were available until now, making many of the games we'll be starting with unpreversed and inaccessible for 25 years.
But first, "Groovey Games" because it was 4/20. Play as a hippie in two small mini-games, escaping the principal of the local high school (where you are protesting the establishment), and then sneaking to a peyote farm to steal the goods. Either way, make an escape in your VW minibus. The games here are pretty silly, with the later idea being more fun to play as alerted farmers will calm down if they don't catch you after a certain amount of time, making for a good challenge.
As for the 24HoZZT games...
We start with "Gay Denny's II", immediately putting the series to its first test. This one ends up just being a song Nny composed that was split into two halves for some reason. It sounds quite nice! We all enjoyed Gay Denny's.
Benco's Untitled game is extremely Earthbound-coded, having something odd happen on top of the mountain near your home, though you spend most of the game in town talking to people and trying to make some connections so you can actually explore the mountain. It's got psychic pre-schoolers, mysterious disappearances, and jokes about Seaman for the Dreamcast.
"Shifters" comes off as something whose story sounds a bit like Monster Party's, though it may be more of a coincidence. An alien needs your help as his damaged ship will soon explode and take out the entire Earth in the process. Features a neat fusion system where you can run around as a small child and melee malfunctioning robots and muggers to death at the cost of having no health to spare, or combine with the alien to gain a plasma ball attack and more health, but it rapidly drains over time. It's a really neat mechanic limited by the very basic action where most enemies shoot each other anyway. Features two bad endings!
Lastly, "Caterpillar" which goes in some unexpected directions. You awaken to find your home/business entirley empty, learning that the magazine publication you've been working with has gone under and was forced to sell everything. While wallowing over the news, an old man invites you to enjoy some tea and talk about your troubles, only to trap you in an alternate dimension where the game turns into a dungeon crawler! The dungeon is pretty good, though some enemies are basically fatal if they get close. It's more interesting for some puzzle elements and an underground village that lets the world have its share of characters. A very unusual game that was fun to explore!
Also pretty much everything here has some annoying bugs. 24 hours doesn't leave much time for testing.
♦ Play these worlds directly in your browser ♦
• https://museumofzzt.com/file/play/groovey/
• [24 Hours of ZZT games have not yet been uploaded]
♦ Originally streamed on April 20th, 2025 ♦
