♦ Livestream of 5 ZZT worlds submitted to the Winter 1998 24 Hours of ZZT competition. [https://museumofzzt.com/file/view/24hoz-win1998/] ♦
♦ Stream Contents ♦
• (2:34) “What if?!?” by Jeff Conroy
• (15:22) “Why the Judges Are ****” by Deadwok Studios
• (17:35) “Sailor Moon” by Roastbeef
• (25:22) “A Brief History of Zeux” by piman, majiCk
• (59:25) Distracted by the "Save Our Sailors" website
• (1:01:41) Personal Rankings
• (1:06:09) “ZZT Mag Issue #2” by Jago360 (1997)
The end of History! And apparently the start of the ZZT community developing some strong opinions about Sailor Moon.
"What if?!?" asks us to imagine what would happen if Christopher Columbus's ship never reached the Americas. And it asks us to imagine if the reason for this was that someone was sent back in time with a number of explosives to sink the ship and kill everyone aboard. Fun premise, though the ending falls into the trap of believing the USA was single-handedly responsible for the Allied victory in World War 2.
"What the Judges Are ****" is our first junk submission! Taking advantage of the fact that the judges are going to open up your game, and perhaps even be forced to play it in order to give it a final score, the author opts to call them slurs and then makes a game about Bill Gates and some weird ideas about sexuality. We didn't actually play this one. I just wanted to share that these kind of entries began here, and would continue over the years with later 24HoZZT hosts generally being smart enough to disqualify them and boot them out of the final compilation of entries.
"Sailor Moon" has nothing to do with history. Nor did the last game really. Instead we get a short series of art boards depicting Chibiusa throwing a brick through a glass window to steal a teddy bear and then going to jail for it.
"A Brief History of Zeux" is the tied 3rd place winner of the series, telling the history of MegaZeux and suggesting alternate futures if only mean old Alexis Janson didn't selfishly stop making MZX to instead get a "job" and earn "money" as an "adult". It's a really interesting submission that captures some bitter feelings of MZXers who come off as feeling entitled to Janson's volunteer labor forever. It too heavily involves Sailor Moon and the "Save Our Sailors" website, an early piece of internet activism to keep the show from going off the air. We also get a look at the future where Microsoft is a joke and everyone uses Linux. 2038 will be the year of Linux on the desktop apparently.
...And then we did look at the Save Our Sailors website a bit. Even more of a piece of history than A Brief History was.
Plus the final personal rankings which boil down to "all these entries are perfectly adequate and unexciting".
And finally, making use of our extra time we explore the 2nd issue of the recently discovered ZZT Mag series. It's a step in the right direction compared to the first, but continues to be a baffling magazine with the vaguest information on its reviews/previews I've ever seen. A real treat to explore.
♦ Play these worlds directly in your browser ♦
• https://museumofzzt.com/file/play/24hoz-win1998/
• ZZT Mag has yet to be uploaded. Hold tight.
♦ Originally streamed on August 10th, 2025 ♦
