Being a kid making games in the early 2000s

Re:Being a kid making games in the early 2000s by waltbosz on Thursday November 05, 2026 @07:28AM (#50378302)

When I was a kid making games, I used ZZT. My brother recently got back into it and started teaching his kids for to make ZZT games. I found the programming language too constrictive. It didn't have great support for things like variables and loops. I still enjoyed it. My brother reasoned that the small instruction set makes it easy for his kids to learn to code in it. I suppose that's true. But he never learned to code in higher level languages, so he doesn't really know how frustrating it is to have to write so much code in ZZT which would be so simple in another language.

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Re:Being a kid making games in the early 2000s by debo_ on Thursday November 05, 2026 @07:35AM (#50378354)

My earliest "gnarly bug" experience was that the "set flag" operations in ZZT are limited to 8 flags, but it doesn't throw an error if you exceed that limit; it just wraps to the zeroth flag. It took me a full year to figure it out as a two-year old.

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Re:Being a kid making games in the early 2000s by dormento on Thursday November 05, 2026 @08:32AM (#50378867)

> It took me a full year to figure it out as a two-year old.

o_O

Edit: i see you corrected it now, but with hn you never know..

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Re:Being a kid making games in the early 2000s by willismichael on Thursday November 05, 2026 @09:17AM (#50379339)

Well, it was limited to 8 flags.

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Re:Being a kid making games in the early 2000s by debo_ on Thursday November 05, 2026 @11:53AM (#50381418)

As a computing native, I mix up my 2s and 10s all the time /s

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Re:Being a kid making games in the early 2000s by soupfordummies on Thursday November 05, 2026 @08:46AM (#50378988)

warms my heart to see this so high. that summer I was 10 and discovered ZZT and the surprirsingly robust editor and language was really where it all began for me tech-wise. and I was just thinking about it two days ago

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Re:Being a kid making games in the early 2000s by debo_ on Thursday November 05, 2026 @09:25AM (#50379455)

I joke that I learned how to SmallTalk before I learned how to small-talk.

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Re:Being a kid making games in the early 2000s by dasyatidprime on Friday November 06, 2026 @09:00AM (#50392383)

I've ha-ha-only-serious described ZZT-OOP as “object-disoriented concurrent INTERCAL” before. The #zap/#restore and #lock/#unlock commands rhyme somewhat with INTERCAL's ABSTAIN/REINSTATE (or IGNORE/REMEMBER, seeing as keeping important state implicitly in the program counter is a pretty important technique in ZZT), and sending a ‘message’ is basically remote GOTO.

Bonus points for using an extended editor to put normally-impossible values in stats fields to exploit different engine behaviors.

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