Unexpected Engines

Collection Description

A mouse-driven ZZT game played from a first-person perspective. 4 is a point-and-click ASCII adventure that builds all its scenery from fake walls and objects to interact with.

While the engine itself is clever, the gameplay is a lot rougher. At the time of release 4 was well regarded due to its unique playstyle, but time has not been kind to it. Bare-bones world design and limited puzzles make it a tough sell today.

Collection Description

Commodore's black, white, and red action title consists mostly of traditional object-shooting. It makes itself distinct both by requiring ZZT's speed to be set to its maximum which makes gunplay far faster than seen in other games making it far harder to dodge shots, keeping the pacing frantic.

But it does more than just turns up the game speed. Angelis Finale also features a first person dungeon crawler engine that allows the player to see farther than most such engines do thanks to the extra speed allowing objects to quickly map out larger surrounding areas. It also features a third-person shootout mode in which the player has to duck in and out of cover, manually aiming at their targets.

Collection Description

Just, you know, a conversion of Bad Apple to ZZT. A little FMV, music and all. The usual.

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A "simple" Brainfuck parser done entirely in vanilla ZZT.

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A ZZT "collectible card game" of sorts. Challenge various players to duels and see if your deck can conquer theirs.

Card Prime crams a surprising amount of cards into the game with status effects and other special abilities that provide a rather unique experience to ZZT. Be warned, the limited nature of decks means that some fights have very specific requirements to be able to actually win them, or may necessitate having luck on your side.

Collection Description

While platformers in ZZT were hardly anything new by 2009, Commodore provides a unique twist on the formula by using large "sprites" via invisible wall drawings that appear and disappear based on where the player is in a corner of each board. More LCD game than Mario, CAT CAT is a cute adventure about a cat's search for their missing owner with basic puzzles to solve from an unusual perspective.

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A procedurally generated dungeon crawler in which you must rescue the captured citizens of Haebus Corpus and bring them back to safety.

KKairos has been dutifully working on proc. generation in ZZT for decades, and CD Slash is the current day high mark, boasting several unique methods to create dungeon levels that feel like something a human author would create rather than a chaotic mess of walls spilled into a room.

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A game which takes the popular numeric puzzle and turns it into a surprisingly quick and enjoyable ZZT form. While this could have easily been a tech demo, asie wraps the game with a nice theme about traditional ZZT gameplay in which the player is solving Sudoku puzzles to kill time while a dungeon custodian gets things in order so they can properly finish their grand adventure.

Collection Description

Thanks to ZZT's cheat prompt, it's possible for players to manually set and clear flags themselves. While intended for debugging purpose, once this was discovered ZZTers were quick to find ways to exploit this, with the use of inventory engines for adventure games becoming a popular design.

By typing ?+I (or some other prescribed cheat) the player can access their inventory.

Evil Sorcerers' Party is one of many such games to use it, but stands out for being such a highly polished game rich with story and puzzle design that greatly surpassed its peers at the time and still holds up phenomenally well today.

Collection Description

ZZT's most ambitious dungeon crawler. For Elise consists of a twenty floor dive into a dungeon full of dangerous foes. The game plays more like a roguelike as enemies only move when the player does resulting in a turn-based structure to combat. The player meanwhile can complete quests, find treasures, purchase better gear, and utilize three out of a massive twenty spells on each of the dungeon floors.

Collection Description

All ZZT games are played on a rigid grid. Despite this, a number of platformer engines were created to turn ZZT's gameplay into something more like you'd see in side-scrollers on 8-bit and 16-bit consoles. These are often rather clunky, but this particular choice, Freak Da Cat 2 is one of the nicer ones.

The game's controls reasonably smooth, the levels have good looking backgrounds, and the design tough as it is, isn't too punishing towards the player.

Collection Description

Not so much a ZZT engine per se, but definitely an example of it doing something that wasn't intended!

Hack the Matrix relies on some bugs with ZZT to execute arbitrary code, in this case allowing it to display an image. As this exploit relies on functions the Zeta emulator doesn't provide, you'll need to run this on authentic DOS compatible hardware or an emulator such as DOSBox. (The Play Online link will use a DOSBox embed so you can see it without any setup on your own part.)

Collection Description

Going beyond ZZT adventure games that use the cheat prompt to access an inventory, this conversion of the 1990 MS-DOS game "Hugo's House of Horrors" manages to implement a text parser in ZZT, despite ZZT having no concept of strings.

How it works is a mix of brute force checking for a list of every valid command and by taking advantage of what happens when ZZT tries to set more flags that it can store. (More details are found in the game itself if you head east).

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Quite a number of ZZT worlds were inspired by Lemmings and its clones. (See Scooter as well as the Zem series in addition to this one.)

Koopo The Lemming gives the player control over a single lemming that is always moving, with the player telling them when to jump or utilize special abilities such as building and bashing to make it to the exit as well as conquer some robust boss fights!

Collection Description

On the surface, this game is merely a well received outer space adventure. Reach the final chapter however, and you'll be treated to a multiboard cinematic sing-along with great animations, a catchy song, and expert choreography that earn On a Distant Moon the title of "most impressive animated sequence in ZZT".

Collection Description

A tech demo that takes advantage of running ZZT at its maximum speed to read a chunk of the board's components and translate them to a small display window, allowing for a platformer design where the player can walk on top things that aren't just fake walls.

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An action adventure notable for its use of a dedicated inventory screen like you'd see in a Zelda game. Every board is connected to a "linker" board that then directs the player to an inventory where they can choose their current weapon and active item.

Be warned, the game is quite challenging! (And noisy.)

Collection Description

A collection of ZZT engines that do the impossible. Many of them require ZZT to run at full speed for not insignificant amounts of time. Others can be enjoyed at a more reasonable pace.

A proper rendition of Tetris, Fractals, Towers of Hanoi, The Knight's Tour, Conway's Game of Life, and more are on full display here!

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While most ZZT RPGs opted for fixed combat against specific foes, Commodore was able to replicate the experience of older RPGs in ZZT, random encounters and all in this strange sci-fi variation of Earth.

Play as two psychic twins, gain experience, level up and unlock new abilities in perhaps ZZT's most impressive traditional RPG game.

Collection Description

An attempt at converting the mother of all games to ZZT. As ZZT lacks trig functions, the engine has very limited support for angles, though the tanks' ability to move and multiple levels of power per shot allow you to eventually be able to hit your target.

The engine provides two weapons, and random map generation with the game designed for two human players.

Collection Description

A ZZT platformer focused on planned, precise movement rather than more arcade like action. After Sid crashes his plane inside a volcano, you have to guide him out using climbing, jumping, swinging, and throwing ropes to aid in his escape.

This is a great example of a platformer specifically designed around ZZT's limitations which make it play quite well compared to the more Mario-styled alterantives.

Collection Description

Both Speed Racer X and its sequel are two solid racing games for ZZT. Beat the clock as you perform laps around a number of courses laden with obstacles to avoid and power-ups to collect.

Plus some very silly billboards.

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Super ZZT's most impressive game by a significant margin.

Tyrobain starts like most other fantasy adventure titles, running around and shooting invaders of the kingdom, but as the game progresses it introduces quite a lot of complex systems which take great advantage of the differences between ZZT and Super ZZT. There are first person dungeon crawls, RPG battles, and some rather impressive platforming levels!

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Another instance of me doing something stupid with ZZT. Wordles of ZZT is a recreation of the game Wordle in which a five letter word must be guessed and feedback is provided after each guess on letters that are in the correct position, incorrect position, or not present in the target word.

Asie's "Laworde" brought the game to Weave, though this version (while more limited and with a miserable input method) pulls the game off on an unmodified ZZT.

Not the best way to get your fix, but a fun engine to see at least.

Collection Description

I'm sorry, I just like making unexpected ZZT engines.

This time it's Yahtzee in ZZT. Challenges include cramming everything onto a single board with random dice rolls, tracking which categories have been filled, and actually parsing a set of dice to determine if you have a full house, large straight, or titualar Zee!