Zzrk: Adventures in the Great Unsaturated Grammar

2007 · adventure · MS-DOS · Chris Pressey

Zzrk is a text adventure game written in Zz, a meta-language usually used for defining compilers for programming languages. This becomes apparent when playing the game. If the user enters a command that the parser does not understand, it is treated as a syntax error, with a corresponding error message. If 10 unrecognized commands are encountered, the game ends, corresponding to a program text that could not be compiled due to too many syntax errors. Zzrk was first released on May 6, 2007. According to the copyright date on the source code, the project was begun in 2003. How to Play As the startup message says, once the Zz interpreter has started up, you'll need to enter the command /include "zzrk.zz" to load and run Zzrk. Technical Information The Zz interpreter used here is OpenZz, which is an open-source (GPL) implementation of Zz developed by the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN) for use in the compilation chain of the APE (pronounced "ah-pei", meaning "bee") series of highly parallel processing computers, developed for performing LQCD physics research, circa 2000. The OpenZz source code was compiled for DOS using DJGPP to produce the ozz.exe executable, and this is run under em-dosbox in this Internet Archive item.