The player character is controlled by the four cursor keys, and the shift key and a cursor key pressed will shoot a bullet. Items that can be picked up include: ammo, gems, torches, and energizers that give the player temporary invincibility. Enemies include lions, tigers, ruffians, bears, slimes, centipedes, and spinning guns.
Development
, at the time attending the University of Maryland, first developed ZZT as a text editor that ran in Pascal. However, after experimenting with ASCII characters, Sweeney designed his first levels for what would become a video game. The game took around nine months to develop, and was released in October 1991.
Reception
Critical reception
Third-party worlds created for ZZT were diverse, ranging from shoot 'em ups to complex role-playing games to a Lemmings clone, Zem!. Other games have been inspired by ZZT, such as MegaZeux, Frog Fractions 2 and ZZT sequel, Super ZZT, the latter being widely criticized for lacking an easily accessible editor function, which was a mistake on Sweeney's part. Computer Gaming World billed ZZT as the first major video game to use object-oriented programming. Although Super ZZT is in many ways a vast improvement over ZZT, it never caught on with the ZZT community like the original ZZT did, and very few games were ever created for Super ZZT.
Sales
Following ZZT release, the game sold about three to four copies daily, and as of 2009, had sold around 4,000 to 5,000 copies in total. After Sweeney moved out of his parents' house to establish proper corporate headquarters for Potomac Computer Systems, then renamed Epic MegaGames, his father, Paul Sweeney, continued fulfilling mail orders to the original address under the "Epic Classics" label. The final copy of ZZT was shipped to game designer Zack Hiwiller in November 2013. Around 1992, after the custom world design contest, copies of the "ZZT's Revenge" collection was on sale with "Best of ZZT" shipped with it for free.
Promotion
Shortly after the release of ZZT, Sweeney started a level designer contest for registered users to make their own worlds and submit them to him. Over 200 users submitted their custom worlds. The best collaboration games that won the contest were The Best of ZZT and ZZT's Revenge. The winners of the contest received prizes of gift certificates. The six winning custom worlds that made up ZZT's Revenge earned the designers employment in Epic MegaGames. Other contestants got honorable mentions for good entries. Around 1992, Sweeney started a contest titled "ZZTaholics Challenge" for players to play any of the ten volumes from ZZT, ZZT's Revenge and Super ZZT, then submit their high scores. The winners received discount coupons to get the next two releases from Epic MegaGames for free.
Legacy
Sequel
Sweeney collaborated with programmer Allen Pilgrim on creating a sequel to ZZT called Super ZZT, which added more features and levels to ZZT core gameplay. The game plays similarly to ZZT, and incorporates floor textures, a different gameplay menu, prefabricated enemies and objects, and scrolling map screens, allowing for much larger worlds than in ZZT.
In addition to archive websites, several developers have released ZZT world editors such as KevEdit for Windows. The external editors would have more features such as color coding objects, fade tools, and access to STK without downloading. DreamZZT was an emulator for the Dreamcast.
Sweeney claims to have lost the source code of ZZT in a crash. To compensate for this loss, a community developer reconstructed the source code in 2020, with permission of Sweeney. The reconstructed source code is binary accurate; when compiled with the Turbo Pascal 5.5 compiler an identical.EXE file is generated. The source code is released under a permissive software license on GitHub.
