♦ Livestream Contents
“24 Hours of ZZT Summer 1999 [Space]” by Misteroo, Various (1999) [https://museumofzzt.com/file/view/24hoz-sum1999/]
(2:42) “Star Trek - The Jilted Generation” by Dunkinbean
(24:44) “Outer Emergency” by Antiviovis
(42:01) “Wierd Land” by Xurethax
(1:28:16) Personal Ranking and Official Rankings
The thrilling conclusion to our space-y adventures!
Three games remain, and oh boy do we go places in this one. Places where no man has gone before. Starting with "The Jilted Generation", a Star Trek parody that proves the brilliant minds that came up with "Puke Skywalker" have equal competition over on the Trek side of sci-fi. Captain Ricard and his crew are traveling through deep space to buy a stick of gum until an encounter with a dreaded Sorg Trapezoid forces them to engage in combat. Conventional weaponry is of course uneffective, but by beaming to the ship and loading their computers with CDs of *shudder* THE BACKSTREET BOYS *gasp* N SYNC (sometimes called N Stink!!! Good parody.) and even *whipsers* ...disco music.
A few Sorg guards attempt to resist, but a portable CD player lets you throw headphones on them and fight them off. The ship is sparse, and we really detoured a bit for the game's odd decision to almost, but not exactly rip off a board from Corrupt Mind, a game made by the host of the competition? Seems like a strange thing to quietly reference (the board in question is a fast food restaurant), especially given that the board feels rather pointless.
Then it's off to a real trip with a Viovis game. Trippy graphics and writing make for a surreal game that's really just a storybook to read, save for a few boards where you beat up very fast snails. You play as some odd looking mech thing and philosophize about life. Should one create art, or destroy everything? Only you can decide! A branching path allows you to do some mass destruction or work on your poetry, doing a reading at a small venue. Of course, philistines are everywhere, and old violent tendencies die hard...
It doesn't seem particularly on topic, luckily the ending has you deciding to go into outer space. Saved by the bell.
Finally, "Wierdland" [sic]. This one... well, Viovis's style is to take nonsense and find a way to make it oddly compelling, through poetic words and artwork that's simultaneously crude and complex thanks to the process of making it in ZZT ever so slowly. Xure just opts for nonsense.
I am unsure what this game is about, how it relates to the topic of Space, and if it was even made for the competition of just submitted anyway. It's got stark color choices, objects that just do things, a ton of fun typos, and puts up a real challenge when it comes to navigating the world. It was admittedly fun in its own way, attempting to figure out where to go, and what to do. Avoiding arbitrary soft-locks, and attempting to decipher what's a bug and what's intentional. Some of it is definitely bugs though. Eventually things break down to the point where we have to cheat our way to new boards to see everything the game has to offer, and it doesn't matter in the least if we visit them out of order.
Afterwards, we do the impossible and rank the remaining worlds, and then using compiled average scores (as best as we can given that not all judges left ratings on every game) we create an alternate tier list for comparison to see how opinions differ between a dude in his late 30s playing 27 year old video games and a bunch of teens in the 90s whose sense of humor aged like milk!
This upcoming Sunday we'll move on to the next competition. The topic? FANTASY.
♦ Play these worlds in your browser
https://museumofzzt.com/file/play/24hoz-sum1999/
♦ Streamed Mar 22nd, 2026
