This is awesome. ZZT was huge for me when I was young. I had already been toying with making games and desktop programs in VisualBasic by the time I found ZZT, but the ability to just throw together little worlds and play with the basic primitives the game gave us, share them with friends, was such an experience for the time.

I wonder how kids today would see ZZT. I think they'd have a lot of fun with it once they got into it, but being an older DOS-based game, ASCII art and all, might be particularly strange to some. A lot of modern games, Minecraft being one that immediately comes to mind, invoke the creativity and that ZZT did in my generation. Still, I'd love to see what people would make in ZZT today.

Tangent: I can't believe it was this long ago now, but about 10 years ago I started working on reverse-engineering ZZT with the goal of putting together a web-based implementation that was compatible. That spiraled out of control into a brand new project I called MWorlds (https://mworlds.wordpress.com/).

Haven't toyed with this in ages, but the idea morphed into an open platform for making web-based games, including all assets (sprites, music, script packs, monsters, weapons, etc.), that any kid or adult could build and share and use in their own games. I really should just open source this someday. Or start hacking on it again.