Written/Produced for Universe Box – Retro Tech

Let me tell you a story about ZZT
A game that meant a lot to me
The unique thing about it (we can agree)
is the power unleashed when you hit the ‘e’
An editor! How fun! I can make my own games
Shame I’m so bad at giving things names.
The creations I made gave my creative side flames
In a small web community I even had mild fame!
We used the ASCII character set
to represent the player, enemies, and pets
Mathematical symbols became epic threats
(as as epic as DOS was likely to get)
I was a boy stuck alone with America Online
making bad games and avoiding sunshine
The friends that I made became my hotline
we even talked about our real lives sometime
ZZT showed me what the Internet could be:
A portal to out there, and a fertile community