Nowadays Epic Games are best known for their big budget action titles (the Unreal and Gears of War series), but it all began back in 1991 when founder Tim Sweeney released ZZT, a unique action/puzzle hybrid. The ANSI-based graphics and rudimentary PC Speaker sound were archaic even back then, but the game attracted a substantial following due to its advanced editor, with which players had an almost unprecedented freedom to create their own game worlds. Whether you wanted to make a side-scrolling action game, a simple dungeon crawler or a lengthy adventure game with a complex plot and lots of character interaction, you could rest assured that ZZT's versatile editor had the depth and flexibility to pull it off.
I remember spending countless hours fooling around with ZZT's programming language and being amazed by lots of high-quality user-made modules, which often pushed the seemingly simple game engine to its limits in impressive and inventive ways.
ZZT later inspired Gregory Janson to create the similar but more advanced MegaZeux (1994), which is still being supported by the ZZT community (latest Windows release was in December 2008 and there's even a Wii port available as well).
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