This is the fourth in a series of reviews covering the recent Boss Fight Books Humble Bundle. If you missed the bundle, fear not! They’re all available on bossfightbooks.com/, from $4.95 each.
“The following is a contributor post by the Bookwarm Mage.”
ZZT, by Anna Anthropy, is rad. This is the first of the Boss Fights Books I read about a game I’ve never played, but it conveyed a powerful sense of what a meaningful experience playing it represents all the same, one which will be recognizable to anyone who loved a quirky computer game in their youth. Some version of the story of ZZT has recently been broadcast to a new generation by the popularity of Ready Player One, which features one of its text-adventure precursors, Zork, quite prominently. Anthropy’s take on ZZT is a masterful piece of storytelling in its own right and certainly deserves to be much better known.
The scene is set at one of those booths at the book fairs elementary schools used to host, where the author first encounters the floppy disk which will be her portal into the world of the game and, through it, of game design. I was captivated by the writing from the start, and more than willing to put up with a deluge of intricate analysis of a game I’d never run across before. Anthropy’s personality on the page is charismatic, questioning, by turns hilarious and jejune as she looks back on her early explorations and shares her subsequent discoveries. For those who have played ZZT, of course, the guided tour will be all the more rewarding.
Folded into the introduction to the game itself, we get insightful reminiscences on the early era of the internet and indie game development. We see Epic Games, which today dominates the attention spans of a generation with its Fortnite competitions, emerge out of the mail-order service of an engineering student, Tim Sweeney, then still living at home with his parents.
Within ZZT, the many layers of text–its physical form structuring the game world, its “vernacular” communicating a peculiar and “mesmerizing” worldview–come in for extended discussion. Exploring the Armory, we learn the word “cretin,” the first of many fingerprints of its creator. Searching for keys, but also scrounging ammo and torches, and tracking the rules of recondite puzzles in caves, but also in the “House of Blues,” we eventually come, not so much to the ending, but to all the ways in which ZZT outgrew itself, proliferating into sequels and spin-offs. Anthropy writes wistfully of the rich symbolism of the purple key, and how moving she found the realization that a game-maker might embed something so personal as a prayer request in the final room.
That playing the game is only a small part of ZZT’s larger world, though, soon becomes apparent; and that Anthropy, likewise, has more to say than just digging into her love of the original slate of ZZT offerings becomes clear in the care she lavishes on presenting this larger world. With reference to many other creative counterparts, such as Jeremy Penner, Alexis Janson, and Chris Kohler, and their variations on the theme of ASCII character adventure, the book pivots to consider how ZZT invited and cultivated an incredible diversity of offshoots. From thoughtful riffs on her trans identity to the 90’s edginess of “Kill Barney” mods, from debug cheats to wholly revamped engines, these “preposterous machines” become the space within which Anthropy reflects on the sociological and psychological implications of this endlessly self-reconstituting game.
The second half of the book ranges over a long list of highlights in the fan-created ZZT sphere, and the dynamics of the online community that has been responsible for producing and sharing them. Again, what in many cases would morph into successful companies began as crews and cliques within this “raucous party” (as Anthropy describes it twice). At times this latter section of the book feels like a rehash of online chats and rants echoing out of the past, but there are still gemlike insights into themes of curation, gatekeeping, and technology. Nostalgia for the punk aesthetic is palpable, and with it the universal longing for bygone days and friends who’ve passed on. For those so moved, in the appendices we get a trove of further resources in the online archive of ZZT games.
9/10 – Read it, whether you’ve played ZZT or not, and be blown away by the possibilities latent in even the simplest games.
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