On Sundays I do live streams of previously unpreserved ZZT worlds that have been recovered. It's very much a mixed bag of games as for so many authors, ZZT was the first time they ever attempted to make a game or program at all. It's hard not to appreciate even the ones that aren't very well made as so often it's merely the first step for bigger and better things. Plus some of them are absolutely bizarre in ways that make them fun just as a weird insight into what a child thought it would be like if say, Kefka from Final Fantasy 6 had his own talk show.
Sometimes though, you really do come across something really impressive that holds up to this day. This past Sunday I got to play Gemhunt, a game that restricts ZZT's normally free-roaming movement that allows players to move in four directions on any board, and instead uses invisible barriers to keep them locked to limited paths.
By limiting where the player can move, author Graham Peet turns ZZT into a faux-platformer. Many ZZTers took the route of creating engines within ZZT to move objects that could run and jump. See Freak Da Cat (1997) or Sid's Disaster (2002) for example. They were even further restricted by the limited amount of things ZZT allows objects to actually do, making the genre for ZZT one that was quite challenging to pull off effectively even for an audience of fellow ZZTers well aware of the limitations programmers were up against.
In Gemhunt, you travel through six levels, with the first five being accessible in any order, searching for as many gems as possible on your way to the exit where a boss fight awaits the player. Peet creates some excellent scenery with each level taking a stab at a typical platformer environment. Forest, desert, ice, water, all the usual settings. By using the actual player element rather than having the player touch objects to send inputs to a different object, Graham is able to make use of ZZT's built in elements very effectively. Vertical line walls are turned into climbable ropes, simply by allowing the player to stand adjacent to them. Conveyors that spin players around them are vines that make players time their "jump" from one to the next before they get shoved back.
Elaborate arrangements of which are actually quite a lot of fun to navigate!
There are no requirements to successfully complete a level. Each level contains well over 100 gems, with multiple boards requiring players to examine anything even slightly suspicious. Keeping your eyes open rewards with entirely new sections filled with creative obstacles. Gravity is applied by having invisble objects shove players down when they fall off certain ledges, and the ice level even contains slippery ice that continuously slides players around when they try to move on it, making them have to time grabbing onto ropes to escape. It's some really impressive stuff that was effectively lost to time for decades.
Needless to say, I'm a big fan of this big fan.
You can play Gemhunt in your browser or watch Sunday's playthrough of the first few levels.
I'll be streaming the rest of the game on Sunday the 23rd of April at noon Pacific as well: https://twitch.tv/worldsofzzt