Museum Statistics - 2025 Edition

Five years of stats! As is tradition, the start of the new year is a good time to take a look at the completed year along in the form of some classic LibreOffice charts and figured! This time, things have been cleaned up and better organized in hopes that one day making such an article from data that I know I'm going to need in advance becomes an easy task.

This year was almost it frankly, until I realized I had an older stat grabbing script that I went and wasted an afternoon cleaning up before realizing a bunch of stats weren't in it, and that I had repeated a bunch of updates done in the proper script for grabbing the bulk of this data. Oops.

As always, this is a bit of a relaxed article, where the stats are more for fun than anything too actionable. You can of course make the numbers for next year go up by making some ZZT games in 2026, but this is more of some weird [service of choice] Unwrapped/Replay deal to get an idea of what this year's focus was, and maybe get some inspiration for what to focus on this year.

The worst part is I had a good idea for a new thumbnail instead of rotating between two of them, and then promptly forget about it and don't want to delay publication over it. One day I'll learn.... I woke up and remembered!

Releases By Release Year

How many files were uploaded to the Museum in 2025, and what era are they from?

We start, where we always do, looking at all the files added to the Museum this year and seeing what year they originated in.

Compared to previous stats, this one is significantly tilted towards the most recently completed year. Previously, it's always has a respectable lead, but now it's a blowout.

And the reason for that, is that the ZZT mines are coming up dry. Sources like the Internet Archive have been scoured for ages at this point, leaving new discoveries of old games hard to come by.

The best source of new finds now stems from user donating old ZZT collections they've managed to hold on to, but those are few and far between. (So if you're still got one, please get in touch!) And as more old games get preserved, donated collections are less likely to have as many surprise discoveries as they used to.

Which is not to say that the Museum has archived every ZZT world, or that your own collection won't have something of interest! These collections are still very much worth recovering. They may have alternate revisions of existing worlds that were unknown. Demos for games that got proper releases. Weird ZZT clones that never got off the ground. The author's own unreleased worlds, which are always a treat and often unlikely to appear in another other collections. Except for when they do, and it's seen as "whoa we sure are lucky you held onto that copy of The Monk that Clecky sent you over IRC that one time".

Keep sharing collections. Keep ripping your old CD-R backups (they probably have plenty of cool stuff the Museum doesn't archive too). Keep searching for more, and never consider the work done. It will never be possible to say that is truly is.

Call to action aside, the spread is pretty consistent. The entirety of the 90s had something uploaded, and the 2000s are pretty well represented as well, matching with the decline in activity on the previous ZZT archive, z2 . There's even a 2022 upload that never saw the light of day until this past year!

And our old friend, the untrustworthy 1997 release date continues to have a disproportionate quantity of titles. Something about the end of the AOL-era led to a lot of files winding up with 1997 release dates that are begrudgingly trusted due to a lack of other evidence as for when they came out. Something is an outlier about it, whether it's the dates themselves (it's probably this), or just a bizarrely popular year for ZZT games (it's probably not this).

asie offers a pretty sensible theory on this: the 1997 dates are when the files were downloaded from AOL. The AOL Compilation where many of these files originate is loaded with January 1st dates spread out over a number of hours. As the community began the work of migrating games from AOL to newer web archives, these files were getting updated timestamps of when that transferal began.

One last change of note here is the plummet in "Unknown" release date games. This is thanks to a relatively recent change allowing files to have not just a specific release date, but a less precise "release year". Now all those games like Mike's Quest 3 say they last modified in 1980 that say "(C)1998" can be filed under 1998 rather than Unknown.

Releases By Platform

What Kind of Files Were We Makin This Year?

This year is another straightforward pie chart. Vanilla ZZT continues to surpass Weave releases, it's biggest competition, but the expanded without excess variant continues to draw a wide audience. In fact, if you look at 2025 release dates, Weave is required for nearly half of them!

Even I finally put in the effort to learn a few new tricks this Oktrollberfest and finally made something with it. It's good!

Those programs are mostly copies of Weave. This is a chart that can do with some reworking for next year methinks.

Lastly, Super ZZT continues to assert itself as best it can. This is thanks to a single previously unpreserved Metal Gear Solid game, which ironically got canceled in favor of a ZZT version instead due to Super ZZT's stricter memory limits. The second data point comes from a genuine honest-to-goodness original registered disk of Super ZZT itself. This disk didn't have anything too profound on it, but we did get a look at a puzzle in Lost Forest that was revised for the more common 2.0 release!

Releases By Author (min. 2)

Which names show up in this year's set of files?

Then it's on to the "who". The authors whose names made an appearance this past year. Wildcard streams have made filtering the chart to those with two releases in order to not have a very very wide graph yet gain. Perhaps next year, this may change.

WiL takes a ginormous lead here, putting everyone else's output to shame. This is thanks to his brilliant strategy of basically never deleting anything and uploading it all last December to the point where a bunch of games carried over into 2025. Not that he wouldn't already be one of the more prolific names on the chart regardless.

This huge number of games definitely skews things in his favor for positioning here though!

Snorb follows at a more reasonable and not buffed by historical releases at nine titles. With 2.4 Hour jams, Oktrollberfest, and just having fun making ZZT games whenever, it's a commendable silver.

In third place we have Kaddar. It's always really nice to see when one of the olds not only rediscovers ZZT, but avoids fizzling out that renewed interest in a month or two. He's gone on to create a number of innovative and showy games this year, frequently on a time limit, and really come up with some clever stuff using Weave.

And I can't keep going down the chart this way, but I'm on there thanks to the 2.4 Hour Jam circuit and Oktrollberfest, with nary a standalone release (the as of writing untitled) Darby-like started in December better be out long before this article goes public.)

The list goes on, with a number of other newer community members fighting the good fight and making some cool stuff all year round. Listen, we want quality over quantity.

Even Tim Sweeney and Allen Pilgrim make the list thanks to the previously mentioned Super ZZT disk as well as a more exciting ZZT v3.0 disk with its not-yet-deleted incomplete puzzle board found in Caves!

Releases By Genre

Vampire Survivors-Likes, MMOs, Infinite Runners, these are just a few genres the Museum doesn't record.

This is a new one! ...And for some reason in reverse alphabetical order?

I don't think there's really any inherent insights to be had at looking at genre tags on this year's files, but I was still curious if something would pop out.

"Adventure", the most default genre of all video games, is in first as expected. You can also see just how much heavy lifting community events did, with contest entries being the next most likely genre for uploads to have. Puzzles and Action are a nice even split, suggesting that we do not play favorites here.

Article Count By Category

What Got Written?

Next, we have the article count for the year split into categories. This is another instance where some changes to the Museum got to put a finger on the scales a bit. A new "Playthrough" category of articles was added, with me committing to recording my playthrough for Closer Looks, and doing my best to edit out the pauses where I give up and have to look at game code to figure out what to do next.

Previously, I've recorded a few videos like this here and there, intending to share them, but I had been very inconsistent about recording. Since the category has been added, I've been good about actually making sure the recordings are presentable, and you should expect (almost) every game that gets a Closer Look or other article that requires playing the game to get a Playthrough as well.

There was a bit of a backlog of older videos that I was able to scrounge up as well, so plenty of previous CL subjects got them as well!

The actually most popular category was of course the stream VODs, which get two videos per week for the most part. I mean, 102 articles for 104 theoretical stream dates is pretty good IMO.

Closer Looks usually get two a month and that number was fairly close to the goal as well, though the occasional Help or other article sometimes gets the spot instead.

There are even those 24 Hours of ZZT overviews that I'm supposed to compile for the 24 Hours To Go series that I so desperately need to catch up on before starting the next contest!

Word Count By Category

The Novelization of Town of ZZT

This is one of those ones where it's mostly so I can have an idea for myself just how many of these words I'm writing. Probably still too many. Somehow, despite trying to be a bit more concise, the word count for Closer Looks hasn't really changed. (It's actually gone up, but there were more CLs this year than last.)

Closer Looks Subjects By Release Year

Throwing It At The Wall

This year's set of Closer Look Subjects was also more vibes based in terms of release year. I prefer to focus on the old (90s) and the new (2000s) a bit more than the "what do mean the 2000s aren't new anymore) (2010s) and "ZZT is how old?" (2020s) when it comes to CLs as it's hard to play something truly modern without finding it a bit unfair to the other talented folk who made high quality games around the same time. Eventually I'll run out of old games...

So yeah. Very 90s heavy this time. If you want your newer game to show up, better nominate it for a patron poll and have it be available on the Game Boy Advance.

Stream Subject By Release Year

We'll Do It Live. And By It, I Mean, The Turn Of The Century

As for worlds featured on stream, 2025 gets priority, as I typically want to showcase any new release.

Previously, this graph has been a more even split for the rest of the years. This time the late 90s and Y2K got some pretty considerable coverage. Part of it is being able to provide just years for release dates. Part of it is WiL's scrapped games for the WiL-dcard series which were incomplete (and thus short) and numerous. A good thirty entries here alone are showing off these scrapped projects and wishing some of them had been finished.

And as if that wasn't enough, prequels and sequels in that batch gave me an excuse to look at some of his finished games, Banana Quest and Voyage of Four! And then I never actually did stream the many empty boards of Banana Quest 2...

VOD Thumbnail Colors

A rainbow biased against blue

Last year I got to have fun going through all the video thumbnails I made that used one of six colors to see how balanced they were. Purple was the winner and I showed the process of making the thumbnails and how I had an off-purple border that may have led to purple always looking good.

So true to my word, I made the border a decidedly non-ZZT orange, and waiting a year. As it turns out, purple is just a good color.

It's versatile. It's high contrast. It's pretty. It's the most iconic of colors in ZZT, save perhaps for yellow, its unloved cousin.

Still, the range isn't too in favor of purple, with cyan not far behind and then three more colors not far form there. These are the good colors that produce nice readable text when overlaid on ZZT boards. Void of space? Green. Outdoor art board with a bright cyan sky? Red. Dark dense forest? Yellow. There's a method to the madness.

But poor blue is just really hard to see! I've known this for as long as I've been writing Closer Looks and being annoyed at how much less readable flashing messages are when the screenshot lands on a blue tick. And oh, believe me, I've tried to made blue work. And without fail even when it looks like it does, I then see the squished thumbnail preview on YouTube and regret making the choice. Expect even less blue text in the future.

As for those N/As, well, that's the recent set of DOSember streams where I got play around with mixing ZZT title screen lettering with screenshots of their original games. In just one month "no colored text" did what blue did in half a year...

ZFiles With/Without...

How Far Has Sisyphus Pushed That Boulder?

Whoa, a table.

This one just looks at the raw numbers across the Museum. How many worlds have yet to receive any sort of coverage anywhere? How many of them have had nothing more than a run-on sentence or two in the form of a Publication Pack blurb?

And how many poor ZZTers never got any feedback on their hard work?! At least... on z2 and the Museum.

At some point, it became more likely for a file to have been streamed or written about that it is to have ever gotten a review! And yet, it's still only a bit more than a quarter of files that have had said coverage. At least I won't be out of work anytime soon.

Analytics Machine Broke

Understandable.

In previous years I included some stats on Museum page views, which have always relied on Google Analytics and never felt particularly accurate. Well, no more of that! The power of scrapers means the Museum is flooded with requests 24/7 that aren't people wishing to engage with anything the site offers whatsoever! As with the rest of the Internet really.

Also have you seen what Google Analytics looks like? It's impossible to find anything there, even if I wanted to see the comically inflated numbers. So unfortunately this means not getting any good insight on the change from the Spotlight Worlds section only featuring (mostly old) award winning games and expanding to prioritize new releases. I've got a tab recommending When There Is No More Snow right now and that's a much better pull for folks to see these days than February 1999 Game of the Month winner Fabrication (no shade intended).

This does mark the end of an era for confused Pokémon fans somehow winding up on the page for Bulbasaur's Online Pokemon RPG Randomizer.

Alternatively, there are about 100,000 of you interested in ZZT. Come say hello? Maybe consider becoming a Museum supporter on Patreon?