ZZT: Epic’s First Game
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.<p>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. :-)<p>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: <a href="https://blog.asie.pl/2020/08/reconstructing-zzt/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.asie.pl/2020/08/reconstructing-zzt/</a><p>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: <a href="https://benhoyt.com/writings/zzt-in-go/" rel="nofollow">https://benhoyt.com/writings/zzt-in-go/</a><p>There's also a fully functioning Rust port, which was written before the reconstructed source was available: <a href="https://github.com/yokljo/ruzzt" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/yokljo/ruzzt</a>