I made it this far without bringing up furries and the ZZT community, of which there were a rather large amount over the years, and this content being from 03'/04', they were kind of a big joke.
This one is the least interesting visually. Nadir is here offering the player a chance to end their game but is so far away that it'd be faster to just press escape and quit from there.
This looks so incredibly unlike the American flag.
And yeah there's a song called "Nadir's Mom".
♫ Has got it goin' on ♫
♫ She's all I want ♫
♫ But it feels so wrong ♫
♫ Nadir can't you see ♫
♫ You're just not the girl for me ♫
♫ I know it sounds crazy, but ♫
♫ I'm in love with Nadir's mom ♫
And yeah, it is a cover of Fountains of Wayne's 2003 hit "Stacy's Mom".
Hey so this next part is indeed more MadTom music boards, but with some IRC logs and commentary by Nadir that's got a good amount of bizarre ideas about furries, sexuality, and little casual encouraging of suicide. Plus some overly elaborate ideas of gross furry porn and- hmmm actually it definitely could go with a content warning.
But this is primarily just some teenagers being dumb, and all the named individuals here have long since moved beyond this sort of thing. We are again, looking at text written 15 years ago.
The following content contains material which may be offensive to some audiences. This material does not necessarily reflect its creator's current opinions /behaviors.
Specifically, content following this notice contains depictions of or references to:
- Descriptions Of Sexual Assault, Descriptions Of Pornographic Imagery, Use Of Ableist Slurs, Homophobia
So not only did I acquire a copy of Frost 2 without permission, but then I got to discover it has a few short paragraphs about me, Nadir, and the furry fandom circa 2004.
Again I stress FROM FIFTEEN YEARS AGO before anybody decides to go hunting down Zaphod here for having a bizarre idea of what furry is.
Firstly we get Nadir pinning me entering the furry community because of Frost and the old webcomic Ozy and Millie. The reality is that I found out about furry from Something Awful's Awful Link of the Day feature! But Nadir linking me to comics like Ozy and Millie and "Crush Yiff Destroy!" (a forum full of weird self-loathing furries who were always upset about whatever it was furries were doing on any given day that made them look like idiots) that really opened up my experiences with the subculture.
But boy is that beyond the scope of this article! Frost definitely had a big impact on me in 2003 however, mostly due to the quality of the artwork, but I definitely I wanted to know more and more about the characters. (Not so much the underground water reservoir technology.) The game definitely had an impact on several ZZTers in this regard though, as we've seen recently with Aeris's Alogorithm Part 1, and I think (but have no way to confirm for sure) there was at least one more ZZTer who had their furry "awakening" partially because of this game. Frost is the ZZT equivalent of media like "The Lion King", "Tiny Toons", "Zootopia", or "My Little Pony" for being a gateway into the fandom. Nadir of the time would not approve.
Then you get Zaphod's hilarious take of shock at the idea of gay furries and the very ironic description of "gay" being a sexual deviation when he was openly bisexual. This is really almost all just a lack of self-respect when dealing with anything outside of the socially accepted mainstream of the mid 2000s. I think at the time Zaphod would have described his own bisexuality as a "deviation" honestly, and LGBT youth wishing they were "normal" unfortunately hasn't gone away in the past 15 years.
<Zaphod`> ... I see, there is a SLIGHT
difference
<Zaphod`> instead of actually fucking
raccoons
<Zaphod`> you want to fuck people in
raccoon suits
moral of the story; godedrp is a dumbass,
let's hope he dies soon.
oh, and that dos should tell him where the
hell to get off rather than putting up
with his stupid shit. that shit ain't cool
man.
as far as i'm concerned dos isn't really
all that furry- when i think of furry, i
think of like terrifying lardasses who're
like thirtysomething and still living with
their parents who draw pictures of like
lola bunny getting r*ped by elmer fudd and
read like sabrina online before going to
conventions to ejaculate on elevator walls
while wearing wolf suits and then consider
those who don't share their "interest" as
"mundane" and out of touch with the way
the world should be (ie. filled with 40
foot tall h*rmaphrodite squirrels who jack
off into like subway cars and that.) and
that the only way to convert someone who
who speaks against their weird insular
cult is to write angry letters justifying
it and saying the perpetrator is guilty of
"hate crimes". *
dos is just a kid who likes anthropomorpic
animals and isn't adverse to the
occasional bit of (non-horrible) porn **,
but is misguided enough to think that this
warrants a r*tarded label. that doesn't
mean he deserves to get shit off of
godedrp, though. and with regards to the
"r*tarded label" bit, there's a lot of it
about, with most other "labels" as well as
furries (goths, otaku etc). it's just that
furries are really dumb. be your own
person, don't stick to an archetype. YOU
ARE MORE THAN THE SUM OF WHAT YOU CONSUME,
DESIRE IS NOT AN OCCUPATION to quote
kmfdm.
so, i tease dos about being furry, but i
don't mean anything by it at all. in truth
he's no more so than i am! well, maybe a
bit.
my little rant is over! peace.
<Zaphod`> Lets just say, I support
whatever the fuck you wanna do with your
life.
<Dr_Dos> THANKS, BUT YOU HAVE TO DEGRADE
ME FOR IT?
--
* yes, i have looked deep into the semen-
encrusted maw of furrydom. it's not a
pretty sight, it cost me my innocence to
see pictures of characters from cartoons i
liked when i was like eight having a dick
strapped onto them and portrayed raping
something, or vice versa.
although i never did find that moomin porn
i wanted. honestly people, yiff something
worthwhile for a change I WANT MOOMIN PORN
** much like myself. hey, guys like porn
when they're jerking it. so do chicks.
as far as i'm concerned your "erotica" is
porn too damnit, some of those words are
pretty damn hot when a little imagination
is applied.
-----
addendum; i would delete this, but since
it's all on zultimate there's not much
point is there? even though dos is not
furry anymore (he is now gay instead,
which is much more normal), i mostly stand
by what i said here though it is a little
histrionic.
also, godedrp remains a fucking idiot.
like, holy shit. every day he remains
alive my faith in darwinism fades that
little bit more. HE'S JUST SO STUPID!
IT MAKES ME WANT TO SCREAM AAAAGGGGGHHHHHH
-zn
• • • • • • • • •
Zaphod continues with the words of wisdom. Nadir meanwhile falls victim to the trap of furries being these gross awkward people with no social skills and that if you don't fit that description you're not really a furry. ("Anthropomorphs, not furry shit" as Nadir's LiveJournal interests list once said.)
Nadir categorizes a young me as one of the good ones. Just a poor misguided youth who saw Penny and Henna and decided to dedicate his life to fox and skunk girls.
His idea that people are more than labels is correct, but makes the mistake of thinking that someone who gives themself a label believes it to fit them perfectly.
He also says that I'm only a little bit more furry than he himself is! This is a lie, I have several Anthrocons under my belt.
Really though, me stumbling across this little essay, and Nadir introducing me
to "Crush Yiff Destroy!" did play a massive massive role in how I conducted
myself online with regards to furry. That site (far more than Nadir) gave me a very cynical view of furries
for the longest time which really kept me from letting myself enjoy myself in
it. Now 15 years later, I can say that while I'm glad I don't have a bunch of
embarrassing logs of me going *swishes his tail at the cute fox ^_^*, I'm
also ymiffed that I didn't let myself enjoy my teenage years! I spent
them telling furries to get out of the gene pool and posting on forums with
others just meticulously logging every fuckup a furry did that we could find!
What a tremendous waste of time!
That may have gotten a little bit too personal there, but furries and the ZZT community have a surprisingly large history. As Nadir says, the text here did get put onto the old ZZT community wiki for anyone to read, so ignoring these boards is ignoring a somewhat notable event within that community.
Anyway I'm not a raccoon anymore, now I'm a cute Meowth (drawn by Vap).
Oh hmmm, the end of the article is too close to the end of the content warning material here so I need to pad this out a tiny bit. Apologies.
Here are some mountains from the first Frost game. They're very pretty to look at.
Alright you're in the clear now if you wanted to skip the garbage.
Final Thoughts
And so that's Frost 2: Ice! A contender for one of ZZT's most storied games with leaks, essays on the nature of furries, an unparalleled soundtrack, stellar visuals, abrupt endings, abandoned sequels, abandoned comics, published years after being discarded, there's a hell of a lot to say about it.
Is it one of the best ZZT games ever made? Not really, no. The fun of Frost 2 doesn't come throwing chicken bones at a not-dog, picking up paddle balls in underground canals, or its grand story that the player learns basically nothing about, but it does stand out. This is Nadir at his zenith graphically, with some beautiful city scenes complementing his already unmatched character artwork. MadTom's music goes half unused, but is something I wish existed in a format other than PC speaker. Together, they combine to make the Frost series an extraordinarily polished feeling game even in this unfinished state.
Nadir laments his writing as being subpar, but I couldn't disagree with him more. Again this isn't the best writing you'll see in a ZZT world, but the bar to clear to be above average is so low that the plot you get is significantly better than most ZZT games. It gets bogged down in lore dumps, characters seem to under-react to what seem like major events, and the hint of the series's greater crisis is barely scratched, yet what is there is compelling enough to easily hold your interest from start to the unfortunately abrupt finish. It will absolutely leave you wanting more. Had there been a Frost 3, I'd already be looking at the calendar counting how long until I felt like I could get away with playing another Zenith Nadir title for this site.
I would have loved to see more of this series, but by its eventually public release in 2007 Nadir was on his way out of college and soon to start his adult life with no time for ZZTing when there was a focus on starting a career. Nadir obviously had planned this series for years and years. ZZTV 6 from 2001 has Martina and an unknown character on one file's title screen, plus a more magically confident Penny on another. ZZTV 7 in 2002 has a nice looking forest which is described as being from Frost (and brings new context to one of the prettier boards in the very Nadir-influenced Algorithm.
I'm going to stop that train of thought here because I'm specifically trying to find a random picture that came up in the Worlds of ZZT Discord recently that was definitely Penny fighting a skeleton and I keep stumbling across more old Frost art. Listen, just look up Nadir's worlds post-2000 and you'll find plenty, particularly in Small Stuff which contains an entire section for Frost related art!
So maybe we never got the complete Frost package, and it's a shame that we didn't, but we almost didn't even get this. It's the realization that this game very nearly just died on an old hard drive that makes me appreciate it that much more. That we have that much more of an understanding of what Nadir was doing in the early 2000s is entirely because I downloaded it in 2004, and Nadir in 2007 realized that it had value and was worth saving properly. This is one of ZZT's better games to play today, and I think a stellar example of the kinds of stories ZZT let its authors share with the world.
frOST - The Soundtrack
And like I've said, I've taken on the task of ripping the music for both Power and Ice. If you're interested in any of the game's music, the frOST - Frost 1/2 Soundtrack page offers a download as well as embed and links to a YouTube playlist for each track.
Nadir is over and done with (mostly), now we're here for MadTom. I've been linking bits of the music as it appears throughout the game because it's really really good. The compositions MadTom made for the Frost series are significantly longer than the vast majority of ZZT music, and of very good quality. I'll just spoil it now, but there's going to be a link to download a rip of the game's soundtrack recorded from 2001-era hardware that runs ZZT natively at the end of all this.
Of all the music boards, this one is the most interesting visually.