♦ Livestream Contents
“24 Hours of ZZT Autumn 1999 [Fantasy]” by Knightt, Various (1999) [https://museumofzzt.com/file/view/24hoz-aut1999/]
(0:58) “A Grunt In The Dark” by Hercules
(28:55) “Path To Mew” by SPAZM0016
(1:30:18) “Kevin Fantasy” by Misteroo
(1:37:09) Personal Rankings
We revisit the past and have some regrets in this set of 24 Hours of ZZT games!
Starting with Herc's "A Grunt In The Dark". In the last competition, Herc's entry had some nice looking boards, but very little gameplay. This time, there are some nice looking boards, and slightly more gameplay. Helmut Gontarski is a 25 year old outcast in his own village. When walking in the woods at night to think, he has a chance encounter with a hobgoblin. The two are initially hostile as both humans and goblins regularly raid and slay one another, but an uneasy truce is formed. When the hobgoblin recognizes the sorrow in Helmut's life, he invites them to meet again and perhaps even join his camp in a cave not far from the village.
Players get to hunt for their missing key, pack some things, and head to the cave. However, a chance run-in with a hunter and confession that he's going to hang out with some hobgoblins makes the hunter quite angry, and he has no intention of keeping quiet about the foolish thing Helmut is about to do.
It's a neat story, where you can't be sure who can be trusted or how they'll react. Alas, Helmut's trust is indeed misplaced, as he discovers the hobgoblins plan to kill him, and by then the villagers have also decided this kid is a heretic who must be executed for his sympathies. Our ending screen features Helmut being hanged, with his own family cheering the decision! What a dark little game!
Then it's off to "Path To Mew", my entry to the competion which was held about a week before my 11th birthday. Needless to say, it's not very good at all. But boy is it funny to revisit now. Framed as a prequel to a game I was then working on "Tower of Mew", named for an actually released DOS game that I couldn't run: "Castles of Mew". You set off with a rented sword (charged by the swing) and pick between two paths leading to the tower. Sometimes you get some tolerable empty fields with lions and ruffians to slash at close range thanks to the game's sword engine. More often you get things like fake wall mazes, bad board connections, arbitrary trivia in which you must read 10 year old me's mind, and a surprising amount of riddles!
I quite enjoyed the Wizard's Convention boss rush where there were something like 4 simultaneous soft-locks in play at once.
After being surprised at just how long Path To Mew was, we squeeze in one more short game, "Kevin Fantasy". A nice title screen, and a Candy Land like dream world are depicted after young Kevin is zapped into the world of Pang. There's an RPG battle against a sentient balloon, and then the game abruptly ends leaving us to wonder what might have been.
And as always, we rank em! Don't worry, I'm not biased towards my own game :)
♦ Play these worlds in your browser
https://museumofzzt.com/file/play/24hoz-aut1999/
♦ Streamed Apr 12th, 2026
