Back in 2016 I wrote about JZT, an awesome homage to the DOS era adventure game ZZT; in the years since I have kept an eye on JZT (jzt.xyz) and played through it a few times. I'm honestly surprised that over the past seven years Mark McIntyre (the guy behind JZT) has continued to work on it, proving updates through a JZT Community page on Facebook[1]
On 5th December 2022 Mark posted:
I'm thinking of open-sourcing JZT this holiday (frankly, it should have been open source from day one). The project started before modern build toolsets, so I'd need to change a few things specific to my environment. Would anyone actually be interested if I were to do this?
Mark then followed up on the 8th January 2023 with "JZT is now open source!" I didn't see this until last month (February 2023) when a near-complete copy of an actual development version of ZZT's source code, dating to June 12th-19th, 1991 was uncovered and published to asiekierka/almost-of-zzt by Adrian Siekierka who also so happens to be the author of the ZZT reconstruction project: a reverse-engineered recreation of the source code to the last official release of ZZT (v3.2). News of this reminded me of JZT and hence this post.
In a world of abandoned developer projects (see ROMVLVS) and prevalent Link Rot it is nice to see JZT continuing to be developed albeit at a constant glacial pace.
I strongly dislike Facebook ↩︎