Town of ZZT has you, the anonymous player, wandering around a loosely-themed “town” in search of five purple keys. If you want to try them yourself, ZZT 3.2 includes Town of ZZT and its sequels (but must be run in DOSBox), and you can get MegaZeux 2.84c, Caverns of Zeux, and the rest of the Zeux series separately. In the intervening decades, all of the sequels have been released online for free. Those first games - Town of ZZT and Caverns of Zeux - have these moderately iconic opening scenes. Plenty of people have never heard of ZZT, and far more have never heard of MegaZeux, so here’s a brief primer.īoth were released as “first-episode” shareware: they came with one game free, and you could pony up some cash to get the sequels. But there was never a third entry in this series, another engine worthy of calling these its predecessors. MegaZeux was updated for quite a while, and (unlike ZZT) has even been ported to SDL so it can actually run on modern operating systems. It added quite a few bells and whistles, most significantly a built-in font editor, which let aspiring developers draw simple sprites rather than rely on whatever they could scrounge from the DOS font.Īnd then, nothing. MegaZeux was something of a spiritual successor to ZZT, created by (as I understand it) someone well-known for her creative abuse of ZZT’s limitations. It also came with an editor, including a small programming language for creating totally custom objects, which gave it the status of “game creation system” and a legacy that survives even today.Ī little later on, there was MegaZeux. ZZT was a set of little shareware games for DOS that used VGA text mode for all the graphics, leading to such whimsical Rogue-like choices as ä for ammo pickups, Ω for lions, and ♀ for keys.