This is a rough document listing information on services which have had valuable content related to ZZT preservation, and any potential notes useful for preserving them.
Many games we have from the BBS-centric era of ZZT come from old shareware CDs incidentally including some, particularly the many revisions of Alexis Janson's games.
The earliest ZZT bulletin board system, serving as the official point of contact from its launch until early 1992; however, it was kept online until 2000.
The SysOp was Chip Hageman (mythran42). No success in contacting so far - the Internet record ends with a dead end in mid-2018.
Software Visions Official BBS Distribution Sites- Alternative Dimension Tol Eress?a (602)955-4720 (801)296-0617 14.4k baud 14.4k baud Rob's Place (705)497-3028 14.4k baud Gator Country BBS Warp Zone BBS (904)783-4071 (607)324-7084 19.2k baud 38.4k baud, 4pm-12am Around Town-Islip Terrace Romantic Bytes BBS (516)859-0703 (206)776-2836 14.4k baud 19.2k baud Metal Alternative Music BBS The Black Realms (312)463-8535 (812)424-3781 14.4k baud 14.4k baud
Home to The ZZT Club, the pioneer ZZT developers' group between 1991 and 1993.
No public information on any data from Prodigy still being around in any form.
Jim Carpenter, a Prodigy enthusiast, has focused on archiving existing Prodigy installations. He has made tools available to extract data from them - but where are you going to find a ZZT Club member with backups this old?
Based on Libraries.txt, there were three file libraries of interest:
Unfortunately, the ArchiveTeam efforts from 2014 failed to capture any potential data from them:
The ZZT/MegaZeux message boards were shut down in March 1998, with uploads no longer being accepted by October 1997. Citing mWorld:
As most of you probably know by now, we have added ZZT, SuperZZT, and MegaZeux to the list of programs for which we are no longer accepting uploaded add-ons, and will we not be adding any new ones to the libraries at this time.
Good day to you. Upon inquiring with PCCMarcia as to the recent shut-down of the AOL ZZT message boards in the PCGames forum, she said that it was probably to make room for new boards, and that you are the one who is in charge of the message boards. If at all possible, I would like confirmation of PCCMarcia's comments as to the ZZT' Message Boards disappearence. Any information you could relay to myself would be highly appreciated. I thank you for your time in reading this, and look forward to a prospective response. -—Kaine
Used to have a ZZT section. Hosted on http://megaboard.epicgames.com/ in the late 90s; a few posts are preserved by the WayBack Machine.
It appears the section saw very little activity, with the only preserved threads (from March 18th, 1999) being copy-pastes of posts from another forum or an announcement of such copy-pasting ongoing.