♦ Livestream of 5 ZZT worlds submitted to the “24 Hours of ZZT Summer 1998 [Night]” by Mono, Various (1998) [https://museumofzzt.com/file/view/24hoz-sum1998/] ♦
♦ Stream Contents ♦
• (2:43) Nightplanet by myth
• (45:16) Showing off the new art-break scene (will be cut from future VODs)
• (47:16) “The Beginning of Night” by theyoda/tucan/hm
• (1:38:17) “Night Man” by mono
• (1:43:04) Personal Rankings
Taking a look at a few longer titles submitted to the first 24 HoZZT. Starting with the beloved classic "Nightplanet", the contest's winner. The game rightfully won the judges accolades thanks to its atmospheric environments of an abandoned mining colony on the side of a planet that never faces its sun. When your ship picks up a faint distress signal, you land to find out what's up, only to find a long dead station filled with chewed to the bone skeletons littering the place.
After powering up the station, and finding a few keys and passcodes to unlock a few doors, logs reveal the colony's fate. Tiny energy-feeding creatures were awoken when mining and began to drain the energy of the entire station, consuming electricity and personell alike as they rapidly reproduced and took over. While a plan was hatched to lure the mites away by triggering a large explosion of radioactive energy using the blocks of highly valuable ore the base was mining, it was hatched too late, leading to the crew hiding in their quarters until they either starved or were consumed.
Your ship's still warm engines, now the most energy intensive thing on the planet are now crawling with the things, and if you want to take off ever agian, you'll need to venture into the mines to rig the explosives and make sure that not a single mite is aboard when you leave.
Today it's a very straightforward puzzle game, but it's hard to not to love. It's just a little bit unsettling, and the writing really builds up the dark gray halls of the colony. The game even has a few endings depending on your success and your ability to maybe make a little profit...
Next, "The Beginning of the Night" a game whose title can only be found via the editor! A three author team where one member didn't actually submit any boards, which actually works out as this one goes on for a bit as is. The opening starts strong, telling the story of the gods of day and night, two natural enemies, taking mortal form to recharge their abilities. While in human form they have no memory of their godhood, and unfortunately, the two fall in love with each other shortly before reaching an age where the memories return.
It's no forbidden romance though. Immediately the two turn on one another vowing to destroy each other by claiming the most followers so they can be the strongest when it's time to battle. Not what I expected.
You then play as Night, going to a beach to convince others that it would be great if the sun stopped existing. This would be a hard sell, and it is when you reveal your full hand, but vague promises of "I can stop you from getting sunburned" and "It would be cooler to paint the sea at _night_" works well enough.
The problem is this is a puzzle game that does a bad job of explaining that. It uses a verb system via the cheat prompt, and doesn't tell the player this, leading to me getting stuck because I have no idea how to use my items, and the usual standard of ?+I had no effect. (Even if it did, you gotta tell players your game uses ?+I inputs.)
It eventually runs into some bugs, and pivots again to you attacking a military base using a dart gun to kill Day's followers (and I really want to type Dawn for her name).
The second section is a bunch of ZZT shooting and a slider puzzle and some weird violence against animals that's a bit uncomfortable. You need to completely clear both sections to proceed to the final fight and I missed something.
The final battle is an RPG and then you win. No ending, probably due to a lack of time. This one is really mishandled, dragging down what could have been a weird but decent game otherwise. It's got some fun art at least.
Both those games took up quite a lot of time, so we skipped another long game and went into "Night Man" an incomplete game that I completely missed was in fact by mono, the _host_ of the contest, who apparently didn't judge so they could participate instead. This one just has some half finished scenes and some art of the man in the video thumbnail.
And then we rank em, which is pretty easy this time.
♦ Play these worlds directly in your browser ♦
• https://museumofzzt.com/file/play/24hoz-sum1998/
♦ Originally streamed on July 13th, 2025 ♦
