goosedaemon, creator of the very nifty ZZT puzzler "Lonezr", has joined Apple McTom's ZZT company Apple Tree. goosedaemon has been around in the MegaZeux community for a few years and has done part of the soundtrack for Hercules' MegaZeux demo of "A Death Beyond Imagination". He is now working on a game called "Forer". Visit the Apple Tree page here.

The Spring 2001 24 hours of ZZT contest, hosted by emmzee, has ended (March 25 at 1:00PM Eastern Time, to be exact). The topic was "Revival" and in total, emmzee received 20 entries, which can be downloaded here. The judges (emmzee, Hercules, Chuck, Lemmer and Fishfood) will start their work soon. Stay tuned for the results and keep visiting the official 24hoz page.

ZzCrook is hosting the 2001 MegaZeux Achievement Awards. Quoting ZzCrook: "The 2nd annual Mzx Achievement awards have begun. The voting (in ten different mzx related categories) can be done at Zeuxworld. The rules and lists of categories are there."

BroKen, the author of a few very promising ZZT demos (Upside, Last Dynasty and Who Wants to be on a Gameshow), has joined Knightt's company Random Inc. With the recent addition of BroKen, who is considered by a big talent by several ZZTers, Random Inc seems to be growing in a rather positive direction. On a somewhat less brighter note, Flimsy Parkins left Random Inc a while ago, because he was in multiple ZZT companies already. Visit the Random Inc page here.

Insane Moose, who recently joined the company Eagle Rock Interactive, may be leaving again already, because of problems involving his parents and his computer. However, Fishfood has let Microwave (aka J0sh) into the company, and ERI seems to be slowly recovering from their state of extreme idleness. Visit their page here.

Fishfood has updated the Eagle Rock Interactive page with some interesting news. Insane Moose (ex-AIOP and Insane Inc) and TimeWaster (ex-Fellowship of the Z, Nova and Odyssey) have joined the company. J0sh (also known as Microwave) might be in as well, but it's still pending. Scribbit, long-time member of ERI, is still in the company as well, and Benco, who was already in ERI, is the new vice-president. ERI currently has 6 members (Fishfood, Benco, Scribbit, Wayward, TimeWaster and Insane Moose) and they have 4 open spots. Visit the ERI page here.

Apple McTom has put a little online place for Dutch ZZTers on the AppleTree site. It's called the "Dutch Corner" and contains downloads of ZZT games made by Dutch ZZTers in the Dutch language (games include old stuff by Hercules, Hydra, The Agonizer, DoggyShop, MeBo, Hermes, Apple McTom, PCL, Kelvin Aarts and more). Actually, this site is most likely to only appeal to Dutch ZZTers and people who are interested in this, but it's still a bit of news. =) Visit the Dutch Corner here.

Me (Hercules) and Hydra have finished our ZZT joint-project, Deceiving Guidance. The atmospheric RPG/dungeon-crawler ended up in being a 2-ZZT file game. It is currently being beta-tested and you can expect the full version to be out here on the Interactive Fantasies in about a week. The soundtrack has been brought to you by the famous and award-winning ZZT music composers WiL (IF), Jacob Hammond (IF) and Jojoisjo (Lame Game). Stay tuned. :D

Recently, several oldbie ZZTers and MegaZeuxers have ventured back into the scene for a bit. Snigwich (of Bernard the Bard fame) and Duhreetoh (of Booshkies fame) checked back on the DigitalMZX message boards. More recently, Veloso (Greg Falcon of Autumn Dreams) took a peek there, too. He has started a livejournal here and might be starting a more complicated sequel to MegaZeux. The latter, however, is still just an idea that MIGHT be put to work. Also, XR3 (Steven Wooster), extreme ZZT/MegaZeux oldbie, was seen recently. teferi had an appropriate name for this: "Blast from the Past Month".

Hermes has joined Apple McTom's new ZZT company, AppleTree. Hermes is a Dutch guy, introduced by ZZT by his real-life neighbour Hydra. He used to be in the company SuperSoft, together with his brother MeBo (of King's Quest ZZT 1/2, Freak da Cat 2 and Quest for Glory fame), but left after a while and formed his own company which has had many names, like Basic Balls, Adventure Soft and Skullware as it used to be known before he moved to AppleTree. Also, Hermes has immediately released a game under AppleTree's banner: Portal, a very promising AD&D RPG. Download it here. Visit the AppleTree page (which recently got a new lay-out by PCL, Apple McTom's brother) here.

zzt.org now has a new color scheme. It changed from brown-ish to blue-ish and it's looking pretty good. Also, Dragonlord has brought the review system back, so you can now review games on the archive yourself, or read reviews by other users.

Kev Vance has brought back the cv_shrine. For those of you who don't remember it, it's a site that contains remixes of the original Caverns of Zeux (the first MegaZeux game by Gregory Janson) songs. The site has remixes of people like graa, inmate2993, Kev Vance himself, Lipid, Craig Boston, MenTaLguY and more. ZhayTee very recently finished a new remix of CV_Story which is absolutely amazing. Also, people like Lipid and Myth are working on new remixes. Check the site out here.

Jacob Hammond released ZIG v2.0.3 (bugfix 3). Grab it now. Also, NMZmaster and Avirox have been fiddling around with multiplayer ZIGging via NetMeeting, something that Skullie, Lemmer and kev-san did with ZZT back in 1999. Visit the ZIG page here, for more news updates.

Random Inc, the company run by Knightt, has been subject to a few line-up changes recently. Cait Sith, their former vice-president left, but rejoined soon. Dragonlord, who used to be vice-president along with zzblue (who is now their only vice-president) also wanted to join Eagle Rock Interactive, and still be in Random Inc as well. However, Dragonlord decided to not join ERI in the end, because Fishfood wants ERI to be non-idle.ZZTDogbert left and moved to ERI, too. They also welcomed a new, promising member: Tony Clifton (author of the classic ZZT game "Donny's Little Feast"). Visit the Random Inc page here.

Apple McTom quit the ZZT company Fellowship of the Z, because he thinks ZZTyrant (FotZ's president) isn't running the company the way he should and hardly ever updates the website. He tried getting into Eagle Rock Interactive, but because that company is having its own problems (reformation; see next news article), he didn't get in (Fishfood did not get his e-mail, but perhaps he still sent it to Vertigo, the ex-president of ERI). Now Apple McTom has started his own company, AppleTree, and is looking for 1 or 2 members. Visit the AppleTree site here and/or send mail to Apple McTom here if you interested in joining. He is also about to release his new game Touchdown, which is a rather promising and enjoyable sports game, with good graphics.

Fishfood, who is the new president of Eagle Rock Interactive, is busy reforming the company which seems to be very idle. Mike Renner (Tseng), Breakout, Blazer and EvilMario are already gone and Fishfood is giving the members who didn't reply to his member check mail yet, out in several days (those people include GipFace, Scribbit, whirligig and xerox). ZZTDogbert moved from Random Inc to ERI, as well. Right now, the ERI members who are in the company for sure are Fishfood (president), Benco, Wayward and ZZTDogbert. Visit the ERI page here.

TurboWare, the old company of Skullie and Flatcoat Lab (now known as madeku), is back! TurboWare used to be around in 1998 (it used to be known as Skulsoft even earlier), but Skullie decided to bring it back again. They will focus on stuff for ZZT, ZIG, MegaZeux, Turbo Pascal and C(++). Their webpage is still being worked on, but you can visit it here.

StarDreamer has made a new layout for the Lame Game site. It's looking pretty good and professional, so congrats to StarDreamer! Visit the page here.

zzt.org isn't getting a complete redesign after all. Instead, xabbott and Dragonlord are going to focus on changing the color scheme to blue/white. The logo is also going to be changed back to the old one, or a new one will be made. Moreover, the review systems is going to return, along with a few other scripts of Dragonlord, which is good.

Jacob Hammond released ZIG v2.0.2 (bugfix 2) quickly after the 2.0 release. This new version includes the following things:

* zigff.txt - description of ZIG's file formats
* More library objects (from NMZmaster)
* Char-editor lockup bug fixed

ZIG v2.0.3 is already in the works and will contain more stuff, like objects with transparent backgrounds and rewritten game engine graphics core (2x faster, and no problems with objects on different layers being on top of each other). Grab ZIG v2.0.2 now.

emmzee, who won the Winter 2000 24 hours of ZZT contest with his entry "Parroty", is now hosting the Spring 2001 24 hours of ZZT. The date is March 24, starting at 1:00 PM EST. emmzee is currently looking for 3-4 experienced ZZTers to judge during the contest. You can sign up by sending an e-mail with your name to 24hoz@dosgames.com or apply as a judge by sending an email to webmaster@dosgames.com. Visit the Spring 2001 24HoZ page for more info, including all the rules.