ZZT by Anna Anthropy

$ 3.95 $ 4.95


Release Date: June 2, 2014
142 pages
ISBN 13: 978-1-940535-02-9 

In 1991, long before Epic Games was putting out blockbusters like Unreal, Infinity Blade, and Gears of War, Tim Sweeney released a strange little MS-DOS shareware game called ZZT. The simplicity of its text graphics masked the complexity of its World Editor: players could use ZZT to design their own games.

This feature was a revelation to thousands of gamers, including Anna Anthropy, author of Rise of the Videogame Zinesters. ZZT is an exploration of a submerged continent, a personal history of the shareware movement, ascii art, messy teen identity struggle, cybersex, transition, outsider art, the thousand deaths of Barney the Dinosaur, and what happens when a ten-year-old gets her hands on a programming language she can understand. It’s been said that the first Velvet Underground album sold only a few thousand copies, but that everyone who heard it formed a band. Well not everyone has played ZZT, but everyone who played it became a game designer.

Anna Anthropy is a game creator, historian, and thirty-year-old teen witch. Her previous books include Rise of the Videogame Zinesters and Star Wench, which she recently made a ZZT version of. She lives in Oakland, California with her familiar, a little black cat named Encyclopedia Frown.


"Anthropy has set the gold standard for book-length studies of games with ZZT, and I would strongly encourage anyone even thinking about writing about games to start here." 9.8/10 - Paste

"ZZT should be required reading by anyone interested in game design." - Videodame

"Her analysis effortlessly straddles computer science, design, art history, anthropology, and gender theory, all wrapped in a personal story of her childhood. It is a very easy, enjoyable, and insightful read." - Robert Yang

Excerpt: Kotaku

More Press: GameCriticsCliqistHeavy Feather ReviewGoodreads


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