♦ Livestream Contents
“24 Hours of ZZT Autumn 1999 [Fantasy]” by Knightt, Various (1999) [https://museumofzzt.com/file/view/24hoz-aut1999/]
(2:16) “Fantasy World” by Oof
(35:00) “Journey To Hell” by Cal_Adams
(45:07) “In Dreams” by Flatcoat Lab () []
(1:19:12) Personal Rankings
Starting off with "Fantasy World". While the title screen makes for a poor first impression, this looks to be one of those games where it was done last, with limited time left to finish making the game. Once playing, explorer Ted Halong falls off a cliff and awakens in a fantasy world where fictional creatures and places exist. To return home, Ted needs to recover the Obula-Mask of the Great Warrior. Thus, his quest begins.
It wants to be a typical fantasy adventure. Acquire a sword, explore a world map, fight some mini-dragon enemies, find the mask, take it through a cave and do something with it to open a portal home. And technically, all that stuff is there. When the game is working as intended, it's not bad at all if a tad unoriginal.
Alas, the game is frequently not working as intended. Improperly linked passages and missing board exits mean repeatedly having to manually change boards to get where you need to go, breaking the flow of the game severely. A few enemies are randomly missing lines of code as well causing them to freeze in place naturally or after trying to jump to a label that can't be found accompanied by ZZT's shrieking error noise. For the judges in 1999, the passage errors were easy to work around, making an otherwise decent adventure into a real slog.
"Journey To Hell" opts for weirdness. A 16 year old wakes up in Hell and knows there must be some mistake. (He didn't die after all.) Now to make it back to Earth, they need to conquer the "Pit O' Flesh", speak with dead celebrities (most of whom were very much alive in 1999), and avoid eternal damnation. There's not much to actually do, and most of the humor is making jokes about sex with Satan or your French teacher.
Things turn around for the final entry though. In "In Dreams" we finally get to see what Lab can cook in 24 hours after false starts in previous contests. The author, hard at work on their 24HoZZT game, takes a moment to rest his eyes, falling asleep and waking up in the middle ages. First you enter a tower and pick up a sword to hack and slash through a few evil knights. Then you awken, not in your bedroom, but in a glass tube in a sci-fi lab. One quick escape later and it's off to a black and white sitcom world. Then a beach. Then a desert. Then a mountain. Then finally the Land of Nod where the Sandman holds the key to waking up for real. If you can conquer his maze that is.
The game is loaded with locations to explore, and while none of them are particularly large, Lab really goes all out in the presentation, intricately shading boards to hell and back, making for a very pretty looking 24HoZ game even during gameplay boards. And after the previous two games, the lack of bugs make it all the more impressive.
...until that final chapter with the Sandman's maze where a clever technique to try and make shrunken boards doesn't work as intended as Lab's understanding of manually placed board edges is mistaken. Though the final dungeon is a bust, the game is a real stand out for the competition.
And of course, afterwards we rank em.
♦ Play these worlds in your browser
https://museumofzzt.com/file/play/24hoz-aut1999/
♦ Streamed Apr 19th, 2026
