A Month of Reconstructing ZZT - Museum of ZZT
museumofzzt.com/article/468/a-month-of-recons...Posted Apr 20, 2020, 1:31 PM UTC
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museumofzzt.com
I see ZZT, I up vote.
Before I knew anything about programming or state machines, I marveled at ZZT, and then the Best of ZZT and the wonderful things people at made. ZZT tricked me into thinking that it wasn't programming, but some other fun thing, not like that dull basic command line thing.
And then I forgot. Doom, Quake, Team Fortress, all stole my heart, and that little shareware app and the joy of creation was all but forgotten.
Then maybe 8 years ago a post on Reddit reminded me and I was filled with joy again.
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ZZT, for those who aren't aware, is a text-based adventure/puzzle game. It's also an engine for making alike games, as the level editor was baked into the game's executable (even in the shareware version of the game). It was also the first game released by Tim Sweeney: the guy who would go on to create Unreal. Yes, that Unreal.
Computer Science 101: "Code is data. Data is code."
Tim Sweeney: "Hold my beer."
I was hoping for a Z Z Top museum.
At this point, it's been long enough that it's probably worth mentioning that Unreal Engine is based on the engine from a game called Unreal by the same company. Although Unreal sold well, it didn't break sales records and it wasn't especially influential on later games, so it's not really a noteworthy point in gaming history. ZZT, however, is significant in that it may have been the first game engine (if you don't include the Z-Machine and SCUMM as game engines).
Not by a long shot. Garry Kitchen's GameMaker came out on the C64 in 1985; a full 6 years before ZZT. And there were numerous "Construction Kit" specialized game engines that came out after GameMaker and before ZZT.
IIRC, Tim Sweeney also knew Bill Budge personally, and would almost certainly have been familiar with the Pinball Construction Set.
I had Pinball Construction Set on my Apple //e back in the day and
wastedspent many, many hours of my childhood on it.Wait, what?
Unreal had true color, reflection, procedural textures, per-pixel volumetric lighting in a software renderer, and UnrealEd was built in from day 1 (that's the connection to ZZT), among other things. John Carmack said of the Unreal engine that it shifted the FPS paradigm—after that, no one could get away with shipping a game that didn't do true color (as his, up to that point, had not).
Later, Epic went on to sublicense the Unreal engine to both Sony and Microsoft for use on Playstation and XBox, in addition to their licensing business to studios. Bethesda Softworks acquired id Software and got out of the engine licensing business, making Epic Games, head and shoulders, the number one game engine licensor in the world. More recently, Epic changed their business model such that the Unreal engine (currently at major version 4) is free to use, with a very generous revenue sharing plan that has a lower bound, so you don't owe Epic a dime until you reach a certain level of revenue, and even then the cost is very modest. In the meantime, you have full access to the same engine and tools as the AAA studios are using, not to mention the film and TV industry.
The first generation Unreal engine was an amazing technical achievement, and unbelievably influential in the industry. And now, it's basically table stakes. Valve's Source went precisely nowhere. CryEngine is also amazing technology, but doesn't have a fraction of Unreal engine's penetration. There are some studios, mostly European, who are getting a lot of mileage out of proprietary engines (TechLand with Chrome and Bohemia Interactive with RV come to mind). But these are noteworthy because they're outliers, not because they indicate a trend.