Pop ver.2

Where can I get Pop?

Pop is available on z2 as well as playable in browser via Archive.org

For those who get stuck, a walkthrough by Foxman is also available.

Also take note that the game contains a programming error that must be fixed in order to obtain the secret ending, and a possible bug preventing the game from being completed in general which can be gotten around by typing "ZAP" at the cheat prompt (activated with the ? key).

Pop

Pop was Tucan's ZZT hit of the Summer of 98. An adventure game with tricky puzzles taking place in an environment I'd best describe as magical-surrealism. Like Deep December, it's a game with a lot of atmosphere, in this case taking place in a large tower on a tiny island in another dimension. The game was well received in its day, and went on to win a Game of the Month Award. It was also tucan's last ZZT release, though nothing indicates that it was necessarily intended to be such.

The game's text file describes Pop as a homage to ZZT's older days (it was only 7 at the time!), being inventory based and Kudzu-esque, and "a really sucky way to kill a few hours".

(Kudzu was another ZZT adventure where you mostly interacted with strange and usual people and things to solve puzzles)

The game's title screen opens with a flashing message on the bottom of the screen explaining that Pop is a game where you need no bullets or brain, and credits the game with a second author known as kabra-corn. I've never heard the name kabra-corn anywhere other than this game, and whoever this other person was, there's no clear remnants of them in ZZT's history today.

Upon starting the game, the player is taken to a menu of sorts. Lots of games opted to start on a menu rather than jump right into the game itself to allow for things like skippable introduction boards, credits, or game instructions that the player may or may not be interested in.

Tucan was nice enough to give some information about himself at the time of making the game. Thank goodness we no longer have to deal with preps with pagers in the 21st century. There's nothing too revealing here, just a typical teenager with ZZT as a unique outlet for creativity.

As is often the case, credits in ZZT games are just the author listed for everything except for the special thanks section. The mysterious kabra-corn goes uncredited on this screen. Several of the credited names list the other games which directly inspired Pop's creation.

There's also a shoutout for #darkdigital, which was the main ZZTer IRC channel at the time, which was hosted on AustNet despite the vast majority of ZZTers being from North America and Europe.

I also love the promise of writing down the music that was listened to during the creation of the game. Listing what CDs were listened to, and what food was eaten became a common thing to include in the credits for 24 Hours of ZZT contest entries. This is the first I've seen it done in a regular game.

There's an inaccessible board in the game's file which does list this music. It includes Beck, Jimi Hendrix, and The Velvet Underground among a few others.

The last menu section to explore is the information on the game itself, what its goals were, how its name came to be, and lastly an explanation of the game's inventory system

And about that inventory. ZZT doesn't have any innate inventory system beyond keeping track of ammo, torches, gems, and keys. However, by turning ZZT's cheats into a gameplay feature it was possibly to loosely recreate the sort of thing you'd expect from a classic LucasArts or Sierra adventure.

Typing a ? during gameplay in ZZT opens up a cheat menu, and +>flag< could be used to set a flag. On every single room in the game an object checks in a loop if the flag "i" is set, and if so, it opens a list of items you have, allowing you to select one to use on whatever you're standing next to.

The ?+i system was used in several ZZT games (and a few action games would have you reload a gun with ?+r), but was relatively uncommon. Actually typing the command got tedious quickly, and if you made a mistake and typed ?+o instead, you'd set another flag and have to clear it with ?-o.

ZZT only supports 10 flags, so games which used this system had to make sure you never got more than 9 items at a time (as the 10th was needed for the "i" flag itself), and would have their flow designed around which items you might still have. If an 11th flag was set, it would overwrite the 10th flag, leaving you stuck with a now missing item.

Let's take a look at how the code is structured for such a game with this new ZZT scroll technology

You can see that the inventory code checks for more flags and if they're found brings up an interactive hyperlink the player can select which jumps to the :r or :s labels to use them. From there, #all:rock will tell every object on the board that if they have a :rock label in their code to jump to it. For objects that don't, nothing happens and they continue executing the code they've been running already.

If an object has a :rock label, it then tells the inventory object to jump to the :loop label and then does whatever it does when you try to use a rock on it. If nothing tells the inventory to jump back to :loop, it will go through it's /i statements which tell it to idle for a cycle, and eventually hit #stupid, jumping itself to the :stupid label and letting the player know that whatever they tried didn't do anything.

It's a cool little engine that shows what sort of mindset you need to have to write ZZT-OOP. You're constantly sending label jumps to other objects back and forth and reacting to that.

Of course, in most cases the thing you're interacting with is right next to the player to begin with and you could just have the player touch it and bring up a list of items to use on it there, but that's not nearly as flashy.

With the game's mechanics explained, it's time to actually play some Pop!

The player is dropped in atop the lavender tower with an empty inventory next to an art piece consisting of four globes, three of which have notches in them. One of those notches has been filled with clay. This piece is known as the ya'yono vekka, as displayed in the corner of the screen.

In Pop, every board has a title which is displayed to the player in a corner somewhere. It's a nice way to help the player navigate the tower, giving a concrete way to reference any room no matter how abstract its design may be.

With only one way to proceed, the player heads to the outside of a library. There are some plants in the corner which do nothing, but are internally named as plants. I assumed it was some sort of debris in this case. The sign also states the entrance leads to a library and the player comments on being surprised to find it written in English.

Inside the library is the game's first lore dump. Pop has quite a lot to read from books as a method of world building, and suffers from a case of telling rather than showing, but reading through everything you find does help you make sense of future puzzles and gives a lot more insight into the dimension the player's been trapped in.

Talking with the person that's busy reading offers no help, as they're too invested in their book to bother speaking with the player.

Several books line the shelf, and you can read every last one of them. Don't feel obligated to read them top to bottom here. Though important in actual gameplay, they can definitely be skimmed here.

The mythology book is a bit meaningless. I'm not sure if a nimby is a Not In My Back Yard. "Yapok" is a name drop of the ZZT game Yapok Sundria.

The second book gives the necessary backstory for the game. In short, curious creatures are taken from their dimension to this one where mysterious "watchers" are entertained by those who search the tower for an escape. A keykeeper title is given to those who show an especially noticeable amount of curiosity, essentially putting them in charge of the tower's upkeep. Nobody has ever found an exit, and nobody has been to the tower's ground floor.

The second book also goes on to describe the creatures found within the tower. This is less of an information dump, and more of hints on how to solve some of the puzzles later on with some sillier entries for humor as well.

The last book is a sixteen page diary by Jenner, the tower's 10th and current keykeeper.

The keeper's diary in interesting as it drops so many hints for the game's puzzles that it's very much like its own subtle walkthrough for much of the game. To summarize, jenner and isla were brought to the tower together, and actually managed to find the exit. Isla ran out and jenner stayed behind, having grown tolerant of life in the tower's dimension. Eventually one of the watchers discovered jenner and made them the new keykeeper. Upon learning that exiting normally means certain death, and that an alternate means of exiting safely could be created jenner planned their escape.

Continuing deeper into the library brings the player to a large bookshelf. The use of half solid characters in varying colors like this was a very common way to create bookshelves. In a bit of an issue with continuity, the player immediately comments on not being able to find a dictionary, but no dictionary has been mentioned, until investigating the torn out pages of a diary in the corner.

The player is thus informed about a dictionary that will let them communicate with those who only speak izanuoylrak'ian. It also provides a bit of insight onto the ya'yono vekka seen at the start of the player's journey. This diary also reiterates the importance of the eight gems which can be found in the game in order to obtain the special ending.

As we'll see, obtaining the eight gems without using a walkthrough or peeking in the editor is a gargantuan task. Even Foxman who wrote the game's walkthrough admitted to not knowing where one of the gems is. I'm confident that nobody got the secret ending without cheating in some way.

In order to find the dictionary, it may be wise to ask the librarian for some help.

And with that the player gets their first task. Find a mango, receive a dictionary. The back of the library contains nothing of interest, just a few open books on a shelf. It's time to move on down the tower.

The southwest tower board foreshadows some lower balconies that the player will eventually be able to explore. On the current level, there's a large shrub and a creature standing near it.

One thing worth pointing out here, is the interesting shading on the tower displayed here. It uses the standard ZZT fade of solid -> normal -> breakable -> water -> repeat which is used normally in the skyline in the background, but on the tower itself it's handled a little differently. There are these sort of vertical seams created which help add some roundness to the shape of the tower. This is done by taking advantage of how normal walls and water tiles are the inverse of each other graphically. So a dark purple on dark blue normal looks almost but not exactly like a dark blue on dark purple water. This creates the seam when you put the two next to each other and is a really cool effect that I don't think I've seen used anywhere else in this manner.

The entrance to the main hub of the tower is the next screen. This room also has the first solvable puzzle, and immediately requires you to get into Pop's mindset. The game's included text file even tells you how to solve it, which is generous because it's already not the most intuitive solution.

Investigating the statue brings up a few interesting choices of what to do to it. You can go down the list and get various reactions, but until you insult it enough, it won't do anything. ZZT games rarely required repeated interactions like this so even just getting the statue to wake up can be a challenge. And when it does, you begin a fortunately slow chase.

With the statue slowly chasing the player, they'll have to move over to a large drill, activate it, and lure the statue to its demise. All of this is a very elaborate method of obtaining a rock. The player can also activate the drill in advance, but the statue does move slowly enough that it's not necessary to pace back and forth across the board for added safety.

Murder count: 1

Rather than proceed inside the tower, I continued down the path. There's a lot to take in on this board. Like the dead body! But first let's get ourselves killed by a coke machine.

Yes, a second game with coke machines in it. Unlike Deep December's commitment to brand ideals, in the world of Pop, vending machines can be far deadlier.

You can safely spit in it though.

Next in line is a parakeet. Just like the statue and coke machine there's a variety of options to choose from.

Talking to the parakeet makes the dead body up ahead go from suicide to murder. Attempting to kill the parakeet yourself is met with a message about how it refuses to give you the chance. You're also unable to offer it any food regardless of what's in your inventory.

Offering it a gem which you don't have will cause it to fly away, which it actually does by moving up and across the screen to the edge before disappearing, which is a pleasant detail rather than simply making the object #die and vanish on the spot.

If the player does have a gem, the parakeet will take it before leaving, thus preventing the special ending from being possible. It's a pretty needless design decision.

The victim is revealed to be a maid, and the circumstances of her death are mysterious, but will ultimately go unexamined in the player's quest for the exit.

The last board of the tower's exterior is the guava groves. This board has quite a bit to interact with despite its small accessible area.

Firstly is the goal of the dictionary quest, a mango on the tree. Unfortunately there's no way to remove it currently.

Next is this viewing lens. Without any gems there's not really anything the player can do with it yet either.

Attempting to pick the mushroom causes the hûdû atop the tree to run down and bite you for trying to steal their mushroom. So we are 0 for 3. What a productive trip to the guava groves. Time to backtrack and enter the tower proper.

The board has a really cool perspective, simultaneously showing both the inside and outside of the tower. It uses transporters which blend into the walls to let the player transition from the outer section to the inner.

Talking to the gatehouse-keeper gives you a prompt to give him your name. Each option gets a slightly different response, but none of them have any effect on how the conversation proceeds.

There's quite a conversation to be had with the gatekeeper. Again the dictionary is stressed as being something to get sooner rather than later. There's also the mention of the mushrooms blocking the actual entrance and the weasel that's been tricking justice.

This leads to the next puzzle. In order to balance justice's scales, something needs to weigh down the lighter one. This is where the rock from the statue comes in.

With the mushrooms gone, the player can now enter the tower, though two of the passages are blocked.

On the carpet at the entrance, is a large piece of cheese and a rat quite interested in it, but other than that there's no interaction between the two objects.

What might appear to be a passage on the painting is in fact an inscription, revealing it to be a painting by isla to jenner. Jenner's diary mentioned that isla had been able to send messages from their home dimension into the tower's since the two were aligned. The hint given here isn't readily apparent, but will come into play later.

It turns out if you look at the inscription a second time, you'll find out there's a note on the back of it which mentions that the two of them had a secret room in the library and that isla has a surprise there for jenner.

Some ZZT games would put passages on picture frames as a way to take the player to a board where they could view the painting and nothing else which is what I was expecting here. Using the same character as a passage for this object isn't the ideal choice, but there's no harm done here in expecting a passage and just getting a message instead.

The worker in the upper right has been waiting for jenner who hasn't been around and as is the theme with Pop, presents a variety of dialog options to the player.

drinking on the job, eh?

what exactly *does* that machine do?

how'd you get into this tower place?

the boss says it's break-time...

Telling the worker it's time for a break results in them rushing out of the room, taking the player along for the ride if they happened to be below the worker when they talked to him

When they leave, the passage sound effect plays! More fun little details.

With the worker gone, the player can now pick up a bottle of oil that was previously inaccessible. After doing so, I follow the path to the only new exit, the cafeteria.

The cafeteria has lots of people to talk with, most of which are pretty inconsequential.

The table in the top left has something a bit more meaningful.

Again the player is told that they need to give up in order to actually escape the tower. Bodhran the otter is constantly changing colors as well in this screen, so attention is easily drawn to them. But the most important conversation you can have in the cafeteria is with the person located in the lower right.

How much of the Pop's story is meant to be taken as metaphor and how much is actually breaking the fourth wall is purposely ambiguous. It's a ZZT game, but are the watchers actually aware it's a ZZT game?