One of the earliest computer games I ever played was a game made by Epic Megagames called ZZT.

Town of ZZT

Epic is the game company that would go on to make Unreal Engine, the engine which powers many modern video games. Back then, and up until a few years ago, copies of ZZT were still mailed as floppies.

ZZT was a game drawn with the ASCII character set. What made it novel is that it had a level editor and built in programming language that enabled other people to make their own games and stories. In a way, it was a precursor to Unreal, and the eventual business that Epic would go on to create. In another sense, it was prescient of the Minecraft era gamers who prefer sharing their own ideas as much as experiencing the work of others.

“Slime Line”, a Snake-like game I authored.

The fondness I took to designing a game, writing a narrative, and creating an adventure as a 9 year old can’t easily be explained. If you’d like, there’s a web-reproduction of ZZT that’s currently in development (and Classic ZZT still works great in dosbox!). A community of sharing is really what made the experience great. Something like Scratch is probably the modern-day equivalent.

A little while ago, The Verge gave a tour of Epic’s office, and took a screenshot of this page from the ZZT manual framed and mounted on a wall.

This game introduced me to the world of programming. The only copies of the map are from the original game book, and are a rare find. The only copy I could find was a Flickr album. I decided to trace-redraw the map in high quality and print it on my wall in my study.