Time for my annual fight with LibreOffice. Let's enjoy a relaxing journey through various statistics about the Museum of ZZT for 2022!
Throughout this article, I'll almost certainly be drawing comparisons to last year's statistics article which is available here if you're really committed.
The usual disclaimer applies. The data contained here is accurate to the best of my knowledge. A lot of the data should be taken with a grain of salt: Counts are literal counts and give equal weight to four revisions of a program released in a single week, demos, revisions, one board experiments, memes, it's all counted the same as a giant release that was a year in the making. The information in the database may be wrong. It might be based on limited information, there might be mistakes that have yet to be caught from the z2 era, or perhaps any issues stem from my own coding! We're gonna see some word counts later and those are gonna consider the various "♦" used in YouTube VOD descriptions to be words, so please consider this article to be a bit of fun and not a critical analysis.
Enjoy the trends. Don't focus the numbers shown here into a thesis about ZZT's death and/or rebirth.
Also the pages are more for splitting things into small chapters. This is not a massive read.
File Upload Dates
For files uploaded in 2022, what year were they originally completed?
Dates on the Museum are bad for a variety of reasons, only some of which are my own fault. "Release date" is a very subjective term. Are we talking the day the world stopped being edited? Probably. A lack of preserved dates in ZZT's history means that for a tremendous number of titles the only time frame we have is the modification date on the ZZT world itself.
One could also argue the release date should be the date the file was made available. For modern uploads on the Museum, this is recorded as the upload date. You could also argue that the delay from a file being submitted to it actually being published should be considered as well. Following in the tradition of z2, the upload queue is public, allowing anybody to grab whatever they like as soon as it's been uploaded, with the caveat that a revision may be submitted to replace the upload sometime prior to publication.
Back in the days when the Internet was more than a dozen websites, releases could be staggered as well! A game e-mailed to the staff running the ZZT archive in 1998 might not be published for days to weeks at a time. Yet simultaneously, personal or ZZT company websites might make a big front page announcement. I've seen ZZT games announced on LiveJournal. If a ZZT game lives solely on a 5.25" floppy disk for 30 years before it's made available to the public, is its release date 1991 or 2021?
The cool English language lifehack I like to employ is "Readily Accessible" - If it's not on the Museum, it's probably not this. Modern games, ZOZ for example, can still be readily available on massive gaming sites like Itch though, so even that's a tough sell.
So here's your chart for the year. For some promising news, 2022 managed to actually come out on top as the number of ZZT worlds being created each year continues to rise. I never would have believed there would be nearly 100 releases in a year for ZZT ever again by the time the Museum was first launched. We'll get into the details on those releases later on of course. There are a few reasons the number is so massive, and a mere "people were more interested in ZZT in 2022 than 2012" only goes so far.
Compared to 2021, aside from the recently completed year and worlds of unknown release while the general shape of the graph is similar enough, the numbers are down quite a bit. 2022 saw me taking over streaming unpreserved worlds from asie, making it my responsibility to upload what was showcased, and those files have had a significant dent put into them. It may simply come down to a difference in styles and the length of streams. Asie would play games until they stopped being enjoyable, whereas I'm a big idiot who rarely lets that stop me. While I haven't finished everything on stream that was started, I've forced my way through plenty of stinkers, very rarely cutting my losses and moving on to the next game.
Asie's streams also had the worlds picked on the spot. When I pick them, I consider the board counts as a rough size estimate in advance, and opt for a combination that should fit between one to two hours. This means avoiding a lot of extra short worlds for streaming unless I have something longer to counter-balance it. I suspect the entire thing may come crashing down this year as each pick gets harder and harder. It used to be basically effortless to come up with a theme and now I'm grasping for straws like games with characters or authors named Chris or I don't know, I think kids in the 90s had a vaguely positive feelings associated with these things.
The earlier years still have materials to be mined thanks to recovered collections, whose sources are rapidly drying up. For games in the 2000s, the situation either dire, or the opposite of dire. Grand?
The z2 era from 2000-2015 is significant for effectively being the only place ZZT worlds really wound up. Sure there were still companies kicking around on free domains offered by the fine people of Tokelau, but with the community so centralized on z2, any world that any author had the least bit of self-respect for, would be submitted there. Exceptions being for those who the ZZT community had ostracized enough that they opted to take their ball and go home. Those folks would post on Zeuxworld instead for a bit before that site also... you know, I don't know when that site died off despite being highly active in the ZZT community when it was around.
But those instances were few and far between, and the most notable author who did opt out of the z2 side of things was prolific enough that we've got a massive number of Stupid RPG games regardless. I'm more inclined to believe that the lack of 2000s era files being uploaded is more of a sign that the era is preserved well rather than poorly. Of course when the Museum started I thought we had pretty much all the worlds from the 90s we ever would as well, and have been dramatically incorrect about that, so perhaps my intuition shouldn't be trusted.
Lastly, the sheer number of "unknowns" on this chart might at a glance seem to be the cause of lower numbers elsewhere. To some extent, you can intuit when games were released even if the modification date is wildly wrong[1]. However, the number is actually quite similar to the previous years, so it's not a simple case of fuzzier dates happening to get the focus this time.
Uploads By Platform
The Museum may be a ZZT archive first and foremost, but it's been known to collect a few oddball items. ZZT for obvious reasons dominates the uploads, with close to 300 files associated with 3.2 compatibility being uploaded in 2022. For non-3.2 uploads though, WiL's Weave fork of ZZT began to find its stride last year, breaking into the double digits even disregarding a few standalone uploads of the program and its accompanying demo world. When you consider the fact that the Museum hosts a grand total of 62 files tagged as "Super ZZT", it's clear that Weave is going places.
Actually...
It's worth looking at how Weave compares to a few other very-much-hand-picked-to-create-propaganda data points.
Weave releases had a stronger 2022 than ZZT did in several of its quieter years around the 2010s, with a few other quiet years just barely out of reach.
Looking at Weave releases across all years rather than just for 2022 though is where the real fun fact lies. Weave has now surpassed the early 2000s ZZT clone ZIG in total releases! In terms of volume, MegaZeux has an insurmountable first place for successful ZZT clones, with Super ZZT trailing in second, and now Weave takes the bronze. The fear that dozens of incompatible forks of ZZT (probably designed for one game each) would be a potential issue post reconstruction hasn't really come to pass, with folks generally far more content to let WiL suffer write Turbo Pascal in the roaring 20s.[2]
Super ZZT's glacially slow pace of releases covers more than 30 years. This young upstart Weave is already a third of the way there after only three. I wouldn't be surprised if the stats article covering, let's say, 2025 includes a chart of it throwing ZZT's younger sibling into one of the three lakes.
Diversion Over
But enough about Weave. Uploads. By. Platform.
Yeah it's ZZT all the way down. Weave nearly doubling Super ZZT for the year, and entirely with new releases rather than historic titles being made "readily available". Without any memes this year, ZIG is literally off the chart. The same for other ZZT clones which are lumped into one giant category as none of them really took off enough to justify a dedicated label. For obvious reasons these things are hard to come by, with many of the bigger names likely having all the content that was ever released now preserved. Of course, any idiot can start a ZZT clone[3].
Then there's also a sliver of ROMs. Thanks to asie releasing TinyZoo, it's possible to convert ZZT worlds to play on the Game Boy (Color) and Analogue Pocket. The experience is still a bit crustier than most might like beyond the novelty, and no world has been released yet which was designed from the ground up to be played on such devices, but it's ZZT on your Nintendo! I don't personally expect a boom in these anytime soon, but I suspect when the time comes for ZZT ports to consoles that can handle ZZT without compromise (from what I've seen, GBA in terms of performance, DS in terms of not having a squished down character set to cram as much on screen at once), that the interest will be more clear.
Uploads By Author
Whose worlds showed up in 2022? Obviously those actively creating throughout the year show up in numbers, but did we have any standouts thanks to recovered older worlds?
No surprises here to anyone that keeps an eye on what gets uploaded. Unknown authors through sheer masses are definitively (read: unfairly) in first place, but that's basically cheating. No, the most prolific ZZTer of the year is undoubtedly BigtimeDude whose surreal adventures and homages to ZZT fan games of old combined with a love of uploading demos provided a whopping eighteen files uploaded this year. All of it new material no less! I'm almost tempted to add a BigtimeDude column to the Weave Releases chart as it would fit right in.
Agent Orange makes a considerable effort at well, with huge amounts of art created in ZZT that gets routinely compiled into art collections throughout the year. A love of short meme games and regular participation in community game jams makes it rather difficult to not have checked out an Agent Orange in 2022.
I'm glad to see myself knocked down quite a bit. I didn't fell particularly productive with ZZT itself this year, despite what the numbers may say. Lots of jams little dedicated ZZT development. I don't want to be the guy that makes all the ZZT games so I'll take it.
Continuing down the list, more authors of old that had their works show up appear. Funnily enough some of the earliest names in ZZT appear on this list: Beth Daggert and Tim Sweeney each making the minimum number of uploads to make the cut. Alas, these are both thanks to me finally getting around to uploading a ZZT floppy disk image and its extracted contents rather than a return to the classics. Beth also received co-credit for her original work on Ezanya used as the basis of RT-55J's remastering of the game.
- [1] The usual examples on incorrect dates include them being flagrantly incorrect, such as a ZZT world dated in the 80s or Pokémon fan games dated before the series existed; to CD burning software time stamping all the files with the date the CD was being burned resulting in a ZZT backup all sharing a Dec. 10th, 2003 date; or sometimes somebody just re-saving their childhood game from 1996 in 2002 before deciding to upload it somewhere.
- [2] Even if there was a port of ZZT in a more modern and/or popular language, with ZZT's simplicity being its biggest drawing point, I don't think people are really all that interested in rewiring code for their own purposes just to make a game where you shoot at the tigers and the tigers throw stars but the stars can be shot now.
- [3] I'm one of those idiots after all. Maybe this year I'll upload Tyger, my old ZZT recreation attempt from my college years.
