Retro Game Lookback: Zzz for Commodore 64

Zzz, released by Mastertronic in 1985, and developed by Les Hogarth and Clive Wilson for the Commodore 64 is a text and icon driven adventure which sets you in your imaginative dream world, unable to escape, until you cross the land of ‘Zzzzzz’ to find the border post, otherwise you will be doomed to a life of sleep – unable to wake (doesn’t sound that bad to me – Ed!).

To traverse the sleepy land you will be challenged with a number of puzzling scenarios – though you do have the help of the Sanman here and there (if you can unearth him).

The game is driven by simple text based input, however you can also navigate using the onscreen compass by placing the joystick controlled cursor at the centre of the onscreen compass and pressing the fire button. This shows the available paths in red – moving the cursor over a red indicator and pressing the fire button moves to that location.

Moving around the world is achieved by typing in simple commands like “Go North”, and “Dig Sand”, “Answer Phone”, “Eat Cheese”, and utilises an early GUI mouse style (but using a joystick) and icon interface for entering, leaving, examining, saving, loading and a number of other game related functions.

The ultimate aim of escaping requires you to find the Border Post, which takes you back to the waking land, and is quite easy to locate however getting past the bandit and passing through the post is going to take some serious adventuring (and perhaps a bit of orchestral music). Many of the games of this time generally revolve around trying to find the right phrase to use in a particular situation – H2G2 was a classic example of this and it applies in Zzz too.

One of the early tasks in the game is to get the upturned bucket (a muffled sound is inside) which seems to be stuck in the sand, after getting the spade you found earlier – you can try “GET BUCKET”, “EXAMINE BUCKET”, “EMPTY BUCKET”, “DIG BUCKET”, “DIG SAND”, and others until you find the phrase “LIFT BUCKET” reveals a face, “DIG SAND” some more to reveal the Sanman who will help you later in your adventure (don’t let go of the bucket just yet – it may come in handy later – Well Well). The early phase of the game requires you returning the bike to the Sanman at his igloo (trying RINGing the BELL).

By the way, if you get stuck on the busy road – try THUMBing a LIFT – you may need to do it several times of course.

By today’s standards the game is pretty short and can be solved in about half an hour, however back in the day (when adventure gaming and lateral thinking style games were pretty new), it was as tricky and challenging as they come. All in all, a fun and entertaining adventure with an intuitive interface and some nice sound and visuals.