Crankgod announces that he almost went crazy when he was moving to Alabama. He says he might not finish his MegaZeux sidescroller Adlo and he might be slowly disappearing from the MegaZeux scene. He already left the ZZT scene and #darkdigital. That's another loss to the scene...

voighdt, vice president of Eagle Rock Interactive, has left his company for various reasons. According to Viovis, the president of ERI, voighdt may join HM's company Infinity Inc. With voighdt quitting ERI, the ZZTOutlaw has returned, which means ERI still has 16 members.

JDM Sonic, the guy who started the ZZT Encyclopedia together with Chronos, has been fired from his company Duky Inc. As stated on the Duky Inc page he has been fired for "jobbing".

jujubee, one of the few female ZZTers, has quit the scene, mainly because of #darkdigital. She says she will never be on IRC anymore, she might still be on AIM and she might release a ZZT game sometime. According to dexter the company Intravenous Incorporated (the company of jujubee, dexter and Vampy) is now dead, because jujubee left. draco talked to her via AIM and made a log of it. I have uploaded it, so you can read it here.

tseng has released November Eve, his groovy new ZZT game, without music. This has to do with some mistake tseng made. You can download it here.

ChryoZak has uploaded the seven entries he received for the Summer Weekend of Zeux. The authors of the games have not yet been revealed and the games haven't been rated yet. You can download them here.

Dive has published the logs he made in #24hoZZT and #darkdigital on the day of the Summer 24 hours of ZZT. You can read the #darkdigital version or the #24hoZZT version.

Flatcoat Lab has finished his ZZT art project Mosaic. It is now available on Lab's own page. Soon it'll be available both here and on zzt.org. Check it out, since it includes very neat art.

The topic of ChryoZak's Weekend of Zeux has been announced: "Reality". Visit the official Weekend of Zeux page here.

Misteroo's Summer 24 hours of ZZT is over (topic: space). The contest actually became a 26H15MoZZT (as zerox said), because Misteroo had to go to work (so he gave us a little more time). All the entries are in and the judges HM, tseng, scissor, lemmer and Misteroo himself will now start rating our games. The results will be published on Tuesday.

Misteroo has updated the 24hozzt page. The contest is less than a week away and you can still sign up by emailing Misteroo. He also got rid of the rule that you have to work alone. dexter and jujubee are working in a couple. HM will also be judging in the contest and the topic will be announced in #24hozzt.

DoggyShop, ex member of Interactive Fantasies who recently returned to the scene, has joined Eagle Rock Interactive. It was quite a difficult decission for Viovis to let him in, because ERI already had 16 members, but now that Xenogamy left all of a sudden, that's not really problem anymore (even though it's a shame he left). DoggyShop will be making a sequel to The Agonizer's ZZT game Forest of ZZT and he will be picking up work on his old project Space Balls, a ZZT movie.

Chuck has finally decided to unban Knightt from #darkdigital, as he says on the zzt.org message boards. Knightt had been banned for quite some time for advertising #darkdigital in #asd.

Duhreetoh has now released a new, upgraded demo of his MegaZeux game Booshkies. It contains the first three levels of the original demo, but this demo has even better graphics and the engine is a lot smoother. Download it at mWorld.

Vampy is restarting the ZZT Carnivale, which tucan originally made. The event will start on July 22 (a Thursday) and it will last 4 days. It ends on July 25 (a Sunday). The activities of day one will start at 7:00 AM, EST. For more info, go here.

Jeff Conroy canceled his MegaZeux RPG Despayre, but did release the game's 4x3 Player Engine (which is available at the MegaZeux Warehouse). Now he is fully concentrating on his other MegaZeux project Hitman.

dexter recently joined Vampy's company Diamond Sun. According to him Diamond Sun merged with jujubee's company. This means that dexter is now in 3 companies: Starlight Shadow, Infinity Inc and Vampy's/jujubee's nameless company. Moreover, dexter also sent in an application to AKWare.

Kev Vance has finally released the documentation on the ZZT file format. You can download it in LaTeX, postscript, pdf, ASCII or HTML.

Vampy has formed a new ZZT company a few days ago. If anybody is interested in joining it, email him. This company, still without a name, doesn't have a page up yet.

Zenith has started a new ZZT game, called Fantasy World Dizzy. It's about an egg, called Dizzy, who's wearing boxing gloves and an adventurer's hat. He is always on adventures, saving his fellow eggs or his egg-girlfriend Daisy. Zenith has already finished the title screen and the inventory engine.

Dark FLR has released issue 2 of his ZZT magazine ZZTV - a very special magazine. Zenith and Viovis have also started a channel in this magazine and they have greatly contributed to this issue. It is really funky, so you should check it out here.

Knightt has been inspired by Teen Priest 2 and is now making a game with the same sort of humor as Teen Priest. This game is called Stupid RPG: Director's Cut. This is Stupid RPG with better graphics and kind of like Teen Priest 2.

draco has released the long-awaited sequel to to his ZZT hit Teen Priest. You should check out this thought-provoking ZZT realism game. It is available at draco's page. You can also download inedible v0mit there, which draco released as well.

Flatcoat Lab is doing issue 6 of iFantasy, Interactive Fantasies' magazine. You can send him art, advertisements, mini-games, etc here. The magazine should be done within two or three weeks.

Magus919 has uploaded the official Week of Zeux page. For all of you who are interested in this contest, visit it here. All the rules can be found here. Sign up as a judge or participant if you're interested.

Knightt announces the following about the characters in his future games and Stupid RPG: "i have no idea what characters i'm going to use in my upcoming games. i know i will re-use some, if not all, srpg characters, occasionally, plus, i'm bringing back the srpg series, in a sense. they will not be numbered, though. for example, the next srpg game to be made is Stupid RPG: Gaiden. wee."

HM, the president of Infinity Inc, has finally created the homepage for his company. Visit it here.

Dragonlord and lemmer have decided that their huge ZZT project, called Legend of the Red Dragon (LORD) will be much shorter than it was originally planned to be. Now it will be only 1 ZZT file and it'll contain 3 endings. This has been decided, because the lazyness of the authors. Such a large game (it was originally meant to have 81 endings!) is indeed very hard to realize. Dragonlord said he will discuss this soon with the other two authors of this game, scissor and draco.

Lame Game, the company of RingWorm, Rasconza, gerbil, Cal and Oddjob now has their new page up at trap.cx. Their new page looks really nice and their games are good as well. They're also looking for three new members... so check it out here.

Eric Drobile, also known as Duhreetoh, has started work on Weirdness Chapter 2. With the help of Yapok Jr (Daniel Haug), the creator of Castle of the Aardvarks, Eric now knows the original storyline for the series. Weirdness was originally created by Gregory Janson and was meant to be a series of ten chapters.

Magus919 might host a Week of Zeux contest, if there is enought interest in this. The main idea behind this is that during a week games with even better graphics, more interesting plots and cooler gameplay could be created. If you are interested in this, or you want to be a judge, mail Magus919.

CoolZx chose which company he wanted to join: Infinity Inc, the company of HM which recently got a lot of new members (lemmer, scissor, yllek and dexter).

Misteroo has decided to pull the date of the Summer 24 hours of ZZT back to June 25 (its old date). This is mainly because of Knightt's and tseng's request. Now the 24 hours of ZZT takes place at the same date as the Weekend of Zeux, but no problems are being expected, because nobody is participating in both contests.

Maybe this is old news, but I thought I'd just mention it. Vampy also came back to ZZT. tseng told me this had something to do with "MZX being an evil doberman". Anyway, we've got Vampy back as well and that's a good thing.

CoolZx told me that reptile house is not really an undead company. He just didn't feel like removing the reptile house banner from the title screens of his games. He is now looking to join a new company, but hasn't found one yet.

Now that Knightt has returned to the scene, he decided to leave "The Company" at first, since he didn't want to program ZZT games anymore. Now Knightt has decided to come back to ZZT. He got rid of Stupid RPG and is now developing a serious RPG, which looks to be really good. Knightt is considering to rejoin "The Company" now. I spoke to Knightt just before I updated the news. Here's what he had to say: "after thinking about the current situation, i realized it was stupid that i quit zzt. the zzt/gcs community is where i belong, and i want to stay there. plus, i finally got some ideas. But, forget Stupid RPG. I have a new Stupid RPG-type series coming up, however, and i'll actually write out plots and do whatever it takes to make them great games. thanks, everyone. i apologize for everything that happened in the last few days."

Knightt has finally decided to stay in the ZZT scene, although he won't be programming ZZT games anymore. He says that if he ever gets un-banned from #darkdigital, you'll be able to find him there again. It's a shame he won't be programming games anymore, but at least he's staying in the scene. Zenith announced he will be staying in the scene yesterday.

Knightt says that he will withdraw from the ZZT scene, mainly because of the whole IRC wars problem. There are some other reasons, like he starts a ZZT game, cancels it and he starts a new one etc... Many ZZTers have tried to stop him, even Chuck who banned Knightt from #darkdigital, but all attempts have failed and Knightt has announced that he is leaving anyway.

After Knightt announced he was to quit ZZT, Zenith also decided to quit, because of the IRC wars. However, other ZZTers (including me) have managed to stop him from leaving. He says he won't leave, unless this "Chuck/#darkdigital thing" is over very soon. Jeremy Brannon has also announced he is quitting. He says he has been in the scene for too long, anyway (he has been around for more than five years) and his time has come to leave the scene. You can still reach him here. Go to the zzt.org message boards to read the post about this.

dexter has joined HM's company Infinity Inc. According to tseng dexter is still in Chuck's company Starlight Shadow as well, which means dexter is in two companies.

The old newbie company FutureWARE (not to be confused with fejj's old FutureWare) is now back, as announces their president. FutureWARE is (in)famous for their ZZT game Goober. A lot of ZZTers didn't like them returning and others protected them. There's a huge discussion going on about this on the zzt.org message boards.

Vampy, also known as JawaTrader, has announced that he might quit ZZTing and start working in Visual Basic and/or MegaZeux. He says a lot of people will be happy to see him leave and that he has already made enough games (and that he can't make better games). A lot of people are trying to prevent him from quitting ZZT and it is not sure whether he stays or not.

Cait Sith and Smiley13 have joined "The Company". With these two new members this ZZT company is starting to be one of the biggest ZZT companies at the moment. TheYoda announces that they now have an official website, located here.

yllek has now joined the growing company Infinity Inc, HM's company. yllek was single for a while after reptile house died. dexter also seemed interested in joining Infinity Inc.

lemmer's and scissor's company w2d has now merged with HM's company Infinity Inc. Actually this means that scissor and lemmer have now joined Infinity Inc, which now has three members (HM, scissor and lemmer).

Misteroo has picked the judges for his 24 hours of ZZT contest. The judges will be Misteroo himself, Atom, tseng, Ethan Hunt and lemmer.

Zorkboy is going to interview cly5m on Austnet on Wednesday June 16 (this date may still be changed). The channel will be announced in #megazeux and #zzt. This is going to be +m session, so you can just listen. If you have any questions you want to ask cly5m, mail them to Zorkboy. He will pick some of the questions he received and ask them to cly5m. The interview will also be logged and posted later.

Misteroo, the organizer of the Summer 24 hours of ZZT, has also rescheduled his contest, just like ChryoZak. The 24 hours of ZZT contest will now take place on July 3 (start at 7:00 PM eastern time).

ChryoZak, the guy who organizes the Weekend of Zeux, has moved the date of this contest back to the old one. It now runs from June 25 (8:00 PM CST) until June 27 (8:00 PM CST). The points will be posted on the official Weekend of Zeux page on June 30.

jimbob told me that he has also joined the quickly growing ZZT company "The Company". jimbob is also known as ZZTWizard and is an ex-member of for example AKWare.

On Sunday, June 6th, me (Hercules) and Zenith (Nadir on IRC) founded the IRC channel #if. It is officially registered to me and it is co-founded by Zenith. A long time ago HM founded #if, but it never survived. Anyway, #if is back!

Two days ago I spoke to James Wong, also known as cygnus, at #nasa (where he is a frequent visitor) and he told me he is still working in MegaZeux. He is still doing work on his MegaZeux game Azeroth, of which he released a demo a long time ago. He needs beta-testers, so email him at james@niobium.eu.org or cygnuz@hotmail.com.

Vampy has recently released the long-awaited sequel to Sim #darkdigital and the sequel to Asbestos. They are both available at Vampy's page. He also released an updated version of Asbestos 2 (version 2.0) with some bugs corrected.

Crankgod has released a new beta of his wonky MegaZeux sidescroller Adlo. It's at here.at/cpl. It still has to be tested by the beta-testers (including me), so it may contain some bugs.

Misteroo has made a Summer 24 hours of ZZT page. Visit it here. You must be working alone in this contest, so no teaming up. The topic will be determined by the judges. As you might know, the contest starts on June 25th, 7:00 PM EST.

Ibrahim, who is now the head judge of the Weekend of Zeux, has picked his judges for the contest. The judges are Matt Williams, Creator and Mentalguy and of course Ibrahim himself.

Jeff Conroy announces that his MegaZeux RPG Despayre has been set on hold and now he's making Hitman for MegaZeux. He did this, because Hitman was getting too big for a ZZT game (with all the cinema sequences and stuff) and he did little on the ZZT version of Hitman.

mWorld has been moving a lot lately, but now Matt Williams has found the right place for mWorld, at usit.net, where he can use both CGI and PERL. mWorld is located here.

Eric Drobile, also known as Duhreetoh, has canceled the long-awaited MegaZeux game Zane: Professional Idiot. He did this "due to lay-out problems", as he said on the zzt.org message boards. Instead he is making a new MegaZeux game, Zane: Hat of Zombalabu. This game will have better graphics, new engines, etc...

zzblue and Kev Carter have recently joined the new company, called "The Company". This is the company of Masamune, TheYoda, Knightt and breakout.

Here's the sad news of today: EvilMario has announced he will leave the ZZT scene and does not intent to come back, not even on IRC. He posted this on zzt.org's message boards today. The reasons are that he has lost interest in ZZT and that the work on his games went very slowly. EvilMario started his carreer at Futureware and via NightSky98 he joined Interactive Fantasies. After IF exploded he went to Chaos and Disorder and reptile house, but he did not seem to settle anywhere. And now he's gone. If you want to see his original post, go to zzt.org's message boards (board: ZZT general discussion).

Yesterday Eric Drobile, also known as Duhreetoh, released Weirdness Special Edition under the Autumn Dreams banner. This game is a *really* good one, so go download it now. Note that this game requires MegaZeux v2.51S1.

Dragonlord, scissor, draco and lemmer have started work on a big new project, called LORD ZZT. This is going to be a *huge* ZZT game with tons of endings and stuff and it'll be divided in multiple worlds. I do hope this project is going to be finished, because is does sound to be cool, but you never know if such a huge game is actually going to be finished. For more news about this, visit zzt.org's message boards and see Dragonlord's post.

I talked to Crankgod yesterday on AIM and he told he has quit the ZZT scene (mainly #darkdigital), because it prevented him from working on his games. He was never really a ZZTer, although he was most active in the ZZT community. His computer is also screwed up, but he says he might still continue his MegaZeux sidescroller Adlo.