ZZT Quotes

“I wrote this book to fill a blind spot in our history, to remind us that outsider amateur game-makers creating personal games have always been here. Since before your Xbox. Since before your PlayStation.

Lest we forget where we come from. Lest we forget what we're capable of.”
― Anna Anthropy, ZZT

“Artifacts of a time when we were terrible and everything Mattered.”
― Anna Anthropy, ZZT

“But on the early internet, the internet where Compuserve and Geocities sites spread like weeds—before corporations cleaned up the place to make it more presentable—you could identify however you wanted.”
― Anna Anthropy, ZZT

“This is perhaps ZZT’s most impressive quality: its ability to transform, to become anything other than Town of ZZT. In 2009 Drake Wilson released Preposterous Machines, a collection of machines built out of massive systems of Objects interacting—often by way of shooting. Bullets were transmitted from Object to Object like electrical impulses. What are the machines? A sinewave grapher. A calculator. A machine that solves the Towers of Hanoi. A Mandlebrot visualizer. An implementation of John Conway’s Game of Life, the famously complex cellular automata that springs from a set of four rules.”
― Anna Anthropy, ZZT

“For a grim while, all you can build are monuments to your own lack of follow-through, and you look at them and you wonder just what you’ve been doing all this time.”
― Anna Anthropy, ZZT