I was captivated by this book, but I'd be lying if I said there weren't a few things that primed me for it:- I remember ZZT (what this book is ostensibly about) very fondly, especially the editor. It was my first foray into game development as a young'un, and I just loved having those tools at my disposal back then.- I read this book at a time when I was heavily questioning my gender identity. The author, and some of the people she talks about in this book, are transgender, and this is discussed...

This book was pretty terrible. Full stop.I was hoping for a journalistic discussion of the history, development, and impact of a curious little game from the 90s called ZZT. Unfortunately, the author spends a very short amount of space discussing Tim Sweeney, the creator of the game. After briefly discussing his process of releasing the game, there is no further direct discussion of the father of the game himself. It feels as if the entirety of the direct research was accomplished in a single em...

ZZT by Anna Anthropy is centered around a gaming community that consumed a big chunk of my life between the ages of 13 and 15. ZZT was a game creation system, which meant it came with it’s own built-in world editor. I discovered the game and community when we signed up for AOL using the AOL software for MS-DOS in 1995. There were tons of user-created games to download and play, and you could even upload your own. A magical time.I made several games under my ZZT company Ultraware. The community I...

The latter portion of the book provides more of what I had expected from the Boss Fight Books series. The first half or so reads much more like a technical manual or instruction booklet for how ZZT works as a game.

It was fine. Actually, in many ways, it's the best of the first three Boss Fight Books. Where Chrono Trigger went way off the rails, Earthbound did its best to explore themes of the game in real life, ZZT manages to do both, but tells an interesting perspective of a gaming community and culture that existed prior to even my own time on the internet.I knew nothing about ZZT before this book, and now it feels quite familiar to me.One aspect of the ZZT timeline that felt familiar to me was the time...

I adored this book. In it I got to dive in to a world I never knew of before, but Anna writes in a way that I felt like I knew it because it's about those weird little clics from our past I sometimes reflect on, where I got to try our identities. But instead of Star Trek roleplaying it's kids younger than me making entire video games! It had that feel I get when I hear about writers in Paris in the 20s, showing that those pockets of brilliance and creativity can appear anywhere and at any time a...

3.5Pretty interesting. I bought ths on a whim without knowing anything about the game and it made me want to check it out, Kudzu especially. I appreciated the personal notes and the emphasis on the community around the game - brought me back to my old forum life :)

What an interesting, refreshing read. Probably not everyone's cup of tea, but I really enjoyed it. I'm a few years older than the author and missed the boat on ZZT back in the day, though I enjoyed plenty of text-character-based games and tried my hand at programming on the C64. The interweaving of the author's trans experience in early/pre-internet days added an excellent layer of humanity to what could have been a fairly bland history of a text game.

A great nostalgia-filled romp through a game that was a key part of many folks lives.ZZT is basically what got me into programming all those years ago. It managed to hide the fact that it was programming until you were already neck-deep in it and by then it was too late: you were hooked.This book is pretty light on the technical side of things -- it's mostly about the culture around ZZT and the author's experiences with it. For anyone in the ZZT scene as a kid it's going to bring back fond memor...

I supported the Boss Fight Books Kickstarter and have received each of the books they've published to date, but ZZT is the one I was most looking forward to and the first one I read. I never played around with ZZT to the extent that the author or any of the people featured in the book did, but I do remember having a few ZZT games and wasting reams of paper printing out instructions on how to build my own games in the editor. The book is solidly written and well researched, but it focuses more on...

Loved this, less about ZZT the game and more the community of players and creators that grew up around the game. The tools to build worlds in ZZT seemed to give voice to those not normally heard at the time - the marginalised, the strange, and the queer.The book also documents how that community interacted through BBS, IRC, message boards and even the games they made. This makes it also very interesting study of early internet communities.Finally, as a video game creator, I could really apprecia...

A PRETTY MUCH PERFECT book about the thing I spent many teen years making terrible RPGs in, and about the weird sleazy social demimonde surrounding those Teen Gaming Dreams. A book for anyone who was a confused kid finding solace in the weird world online, figuring out your space in the world through secret IRC channels, creating grandiose video game dreams that're totally irrelevant to the outside world. I'm even interviewed in it, y'all, so check it out

Somehow, I have never actually played much ZZT, if any at all -- but I grew up in its era, playing other ASCII-based games and downloading other episodic shareware games from local BBSes. Lack of familiarity with the game being discussed in no way diminished my enjoyment of the text, which is really about larger themes of creativity and coming of age. This book does an excellent job of capturing a unique moment in time, where digital communication was still operating on a smaller scale, independ...

It took me WAY too long to discover Boss Fight Books. However, I made it a point to jump right in, and jump I did.I spent some time reading many of the first ten books' intros, and while most intrigued me, it was Anthropy's ZZT that invited me back.I really enjoyed this book--even having never heard of ZZT before. (Yes, that probably makes me a horrible "gamer," but I was never into the PC scene.) What made it work so well is that I not only felt like I understood what the game was about, but I

Nutshell: Anna Anthropy provides a very personal account of being part of the ZZT game creation scene when the game (and the Internet) was new. I've read a few Boss Fight books before, and liked them; a deep dive into a videogame that means a lot to the author feels like a warm hug of a book, if you're in the right mood. Despite that, however, ZZT sat on my shelf for a long time unread. I'd never had any personal experience with the game, and what I knew of it--action ascii adventure thing--felt...

In the vein of Boss Fight Books Volume 1:EarthBound, but is written in a tighter fashion and also has good insight into the creative process behind a lot of personal game development.Whereas the first book was a beautifully sprawling mess of biography and description, this one is tighter. This befits the narrative architecture of each game.Anna Anthropy has shown a gift for embedding the autobiographical (esp. pertaining to her personal journey) into her work, and this book is no exception. It r...

A fantastic book that combines personal memories of a game and its significance with an overview of its pop culture context in the days of the early internet.

ZZT (Or This Is Our Punk Rock, to use the subtitle I imagined over the course of reading it) is a coming of age story for the PC generation’s middle children. In providing both an accurate and entertaining account of her experiences with the game, Anna Anthropy bottles the feeling of early Internet and the Wild West era of shareware.Anthropy depicts youth with a rare honesty that scans as both intensely personal and instantly relatable. Using interviews with other ZZT creators in addition to her...

Another insightful look into the history of video games from Boss Fight Books. Even without playing ZZT myself, Anna Anthropy brings the game to life through the stories of the players who were shaped by it and shaped it themselves.

Throughout her book Anna tells you not just what ZZT is, who made it, and how it works, but also tells you about the community of people it inspired. The majority of this book is about how this video game and it's creation tools inspired so many young people to go out and create. Also an important thread inside this book is the story of how ZZT and it's online community helped Anna discover herself. This book is filled with nostalgia (not just for these games, but for the early internet), heart,...