There have been a lot of things I grew up with as a kid that I always assumed would just be forgotten, as most things are. I didn't have access to many fancy games or hardware in the 90s, so a lot of my early computer memories are of playing ZZT on my parent's ancient (even then) PC with a monochrome amber display. It's really something to see that it evolved into a whole subculture of quick-and-dirty game dev for teens, and that THAT in turn is now also history and is being preserved and passed on. Computers advance so quickly, and the assumption is often that the new thing will completely replace the old. But sometimes, the old still has a place, even many years on.
" If you remember hostile teenagers dedicating an unhealthy amount of their time to harassment, never letting mistakes be forgotten, or screaming slurs, those days are long past."
Mixed feelings on that, though I get what the author's going for. My experience of the "early" web (95-02 or so) was definitely that it was often "toxic," to use an obnoxious modern term, but it was also wonderfully free and honest. When another teenager hurled slurs at you, he wasn't doing it to up his social cred in some perverse way, or advance some twisted economic or political agenda. He just genuinely thought you were a piece of shit (or usually something much less polite).
The weakness of teenagers is that they tend to be overly emotional, dramatic, and short-sighted. But as I've gotten older, it's become clear that the weakness of adults is that they're about 90% suit and tie. Everyone is so obsessed with maintaining their image that there's almost no space to be an actual human being anymore, and the cancer that is social media has magnified this a hundredfold. Frankly, I think I prefer the teenagers. At least they had an excuse.
That quote you brought up is referencing, in a veiled manner, a specific time and events in the past of a specific, major ZZT community. The people who were harassed then certainly didn't deserve it. Some oldbies feel guilty, in retrospect, over what transpired in the past - it was wrong then as much as it is seen as wrong now.
Fair enough then, and good to hear that's the case. Sometimes people grow up, genuinely, and become better people, and sometimes they "grow up" and just become pretentious. Some harassment is real harassment, caused by people being shitty, and some is just people reacting in a reasonable way to people being shitty. I obviously have no point point of reference here, and it's ancient history by now, but I'll take your word that it this was a case of genuine bad behavior being regretted later.
Looks like they are more than just 'still out here'. Sounds like they are in the midst of a revival of interest and an influx of a new community.
I'd never heard of zzt before today. It appears to be a way to make text games of some sort, a la Zork I imagine? In July I will be reading the Twisty Little Passages book, and I think I may have found the software to use while going through the book.
EDIT: nope. ddg shows it does some sort of top down map with enemies etc. Closer to a 'retro Game Maker 7' or Clonk style game. That shows me for thinking I can infer what zzt is just from that page. Sounds like I'm better off with twine, inform, ren'py, or inky after all.
The page linked was targetted to community oldbies who haven't been around for the last few years and the revival of the scene. If you're new to ZZT, try https://museumofzzt.com/about-zzt instead.
Obligatory PSA: If you have any backups of community ZZT game worlds from the 90s and early 00s, please let us know! The past year has brought hundreds of rediscovered worlds, previously lost or not known about, particularly from the AOL era. Unfortunately, we also know there were more worlds on AOL which we don't have backups of, as well as poor coverage of the Prodigy, CompuServe, and other BBS-era communities.
That page loaded so fast I had to stop and come write about it here. I middle clicked the link and before I could switch tabs the whole thing as loaded. I haven't bothered to read anything yet, in the age of enormously slowly loading pages that was shocking in a good way.
When you make web pages to serve the user, instead of entangle them, it doesn't take much. Just a little simple html and css go a long way. And really, should the fansite of an ASCII game from the 90s be anything else?
" If you remember hostile teenagers dedicating an unhealthy amount of their time to harassment, never letting mistakes be forgotten, or screaming slurs, those days are long past." Mixed feelings on that, though I get what the author's going for. My experience of the "early" web (95-02 or so) was definitely that it was often "toxic," to use an obnoxious modern term, but it was also wonderfully free and honest. When another teenager hurled slurs at you, he wasn't doing it to up his social cred in some perverse way, or advance some twisted economic or political agenda. He just genuinely thought you were a piece of shit (or usually something much less polite).
The weakness of teenagers is that they tend to be overly emotional, dramatic, and short-sighted. But as I've gotten older, it's become clear that the weakness of adults is that they're about 90% suit and tie. Everyone is so obsessed with maintaining their image that there's almost no space to be an actual human being anymore, and the cancer that is social media has magnified this a hundredfold. Frankly, I think I prefer the teenagers. At least they had an excuse.