ZZT is an ANSI character-based video game, created in 1991 by Tim Sweeney of Potomac Computer Systems which became Epic MegaGames in 1992. It remains a popular MS-DOS game creation system. ZZT itself is not an acronym for anything; its title was simply chosen so it would always appear at the very bottom of newsgroup listings. However, it was later jokingly mentioned by Sweeney as being short for Zoo of Zero Tolerance, which has mistakenly become a popular belief.
ZZT's graphics were obsolete before it was even created; it used the same style of text-mode graphics that Kingdom of Kroz used 4 years earlier. Often referred to as ANSI, the character set used in the game is actually IBM/MS-DOS Code page 437 which differs from the most common form of ANSI found today, Windows-1252. Despite the outdated graphics, ZZT managed to become fairly popular because of its integration of a simple but effective object-oriented scripting language known as ZZT-OOP. At the time this was groundbreaking, as most functionality in prior games had been hard-coded. The language allowed extensibility that no other game was able to provide, and allowed a large degree of community involvement that extended far beyond simply creating level terrain with the built-in editor, but rather involved writing programs to make the game run.
Wikipedia[ - ]
ZZT is an ANSI character-based video game, created in 1991 by Tim Sweeney of Potomac Computer...
[ + ]
ZZT is an ANSI character-based video game, created in 1991 by Tim Sweeney of Potomac Computer Systems which became Epic MegaGames in 1992. It remains a popular MS-DOS game creation system. ZZT itself is not an acronym for anything; its title was simply chosen so it would always appear at the very bottom of newsgroup listings. However, it was later jokingly mentioned by Sweeney as being short for Zoo of Zero Tolerance, which has mistakenly become a popular belief.
ZZT's graphics were obsolete before it was even created; it used the same style of text-mode graphics that Kingdom of Kroz used 4 years earlier. Often referred to as ANSI, the character set used in the game is actually IBM/MS-DOS Code page 437 which differs from the most common form of ANSI found today, Windows-1252. Despite the outdated graphics, ZZT managed to become fairly popular because of its integration of a simple but effective object-oriented scripting language known as ZZT-OOP. At the time this was groundbreaking, as most functionality in prior games had been hard-coded. The language allowed extensibility that no other game was able to provide, and allowed a large degree of community involvement that extended far beyond simply creating level terrain with the built-in editor, but rather involved writing programs to make the game run.
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10/22/2006
