♦ Livestream Contents
“24 Hours of ZZT Autumn 1999 [Fantasy]” by Knightt, Various (1999) [https://museumofzzt.com/file/view/24hoz-aut1999/]
(2:48) “PHNATSAY STFUF” by craNKGod
(7:00) “Boo!” by diggy
(14:46) “The Disgruntled Elf” by gerbil, Viovis
(29:35) “Sometimes Good & Sometimes Bad The Serpants Will” by TheTantrum
(44:36) “The TV Dinner Box” by nny
(56:07) “Escape From Bessemer” by Eurakarte
(1:16:24) Personal Rankings
We start by getting some junk out of the way. CraNKGod's "Phantasy Stuff" is a junk entry to rile up the judges consisting of an invisible maze on the title screen and then a fight with one tiger before emerging victorious and calling out the judges by name to tell them they suck! A great start to the collection for sure.
Then, one notch higher in terms of effort we can "Boo!" a series of mini games that amounts to shooting your choice of ZZT built-in in your choice of numbers. Unlike crank's entry, this one didn't just get low scores, it got disqualified entirely as its author submitted two games to the event. The judges were nice enough to make this less sincere entry be the one they axed.
After that it's "The Disgruntled Elf", where you gold is taken away by the tax man, and you get a bit of bloodlust over it. First there's a timing mini game in an attempt to push a log off of your treetop home onto the tax collector's head before he escapes, but regardless of your success, it's time for violence. Grab your sword and head to the village to kill everyone. Assuming you can get your sword, a dedicated object on the board that follows you around, to line itself up properly for stabbing. Very short, but the title screen ain't bad at all.
We continue with "The Serpants Will" [sic], which isn't much, but it is something. A short, aimless adventure where you explore a castle, visit a town to do some shopping, and then heard to Serpantland to fight a bunch of snakes. The castle looks nice, and the game maximizes the number of boards the author could make in 24 hours by shrinking every screen down to a centered window rather than fill full boards, making the game a little breezier to get through as well. The game's boss is broken so no ending is reached, though that ending would just be a victorious endgame.
Next up, "The TV Dinner Box", a game that suffers from the author's nap turning into 13 hours of sleep, which certainly ate into their time. So instead it's a menu, and a single dark board where a TV dinner sings a song from Final Fantasy to you and you think about chocobos before it ends. All those kids drinking 2 liters of mountain dew for these events suddenly find themselves justified.
Finally, "Escape From Bessemer". Overly excitable Timmy Doe causes an incident when pressing buttons on experimental machinery, sending him to the land of Bessemer and also in the past? To find a way back home, he has to collect the keys to the home of the mysterious warlock that has conquered the land, but it actually pretty chill. You go around through a number of single screen levels acquiring keys by fighting your way through some basic ZZT action segments with lions to shoot and buttons to push. It's pretty basic stuff, but entirely functional and of respectable quality. The best game of the set so far!
And as always, they get ranked so we can see how a modern look at the games differs from the opinions of the judges in ye olden days.
♦ Play this world in your browser
https://museumofzzt.com/file/play/24hoz-aut1999/
♦ Streamed Mar 29th, 2026
