Before Fortnite, There Was ZZT: Meet Epic’s First Game

• ruzzt

  1 50 0.0 Rust

  RUZZT - A ZZT game engine clone written in Rust

ZZT holds a special place in my heart. I played the shareware "Town of ZZT" as a teenager, made my own (very incomplete) worlds, and had fun with the programming language, ZZT-OOP -- a very quirky beast.

Every few years I have a silly notion I want to write a similar game but with a real programming language like Lua (or one of my own creation). Then I sketch up the easy stuff for a bit, but give up as soon as it gets hard. :-)

I think there's been something of a resurgence of ZZT stuff in recent times, thanks in no small part to Adrian Siekierka's work, particularly his "Reconstruction of ZZT", a reverse engineering of the lost Turbo Pascal source code. That project is incredible to me -- the reconstructed source code, when compiled with Turbo Pascal 5.5, compiles to an executable file that's byte-for-byte identical to the original ZZT.EXE. His description is here: https://blog.asie.pl/2020/08/reconstructing-zzt/

One fun thing I did do was take Adrian's Pascal source code, and write a Pascal-to-Go transpiler to produce a Go version of the same. It kinda works: https://benhoyt.com/writings/zzt-in-go/

There's also a fully functioning Rust port, which was written before the reconstructed source was available: https://github.com/yokljo/ruzzt

• reconstruction-of-zzt

  2 345 1.8 Pascal

  The Reconstruction of ZZT

Yes, I dug in a bit further and found where it was checked in the editor. (at least in the reconstruction!)

https://github.com/asiekierka/reconstruction-of-zzt/blob/mas...

It looks like the SECRET flag was intended to prevent editing of both save files and built-in worlds.

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