Closer Look: Pop

Jenner is whisked away into the portal he created to escape from the tower's dimension and return back to his own. Despite warning the player not to cross the exit, there's nothing else for the player to do at this point but proceed.

The fourth wall is suddenly annihilated in some commentary on player agency that you'd expect from Undertale. All the talk of a game and a secret ending was literal. The mention of giving up being the only way to escape, and escaping the tower being certain death are also revealed to be true.

By playing Pop you've agreed to its rules, and a ZZT game has to end with a game over whether you've won or lost.

While today this sort of meta narrative of "is the player guiding the game's player or is the game's player taking the person at the keyboard on a journey" isn't the most groundbreaking and insightful commentary, I have to give Tucan props for coming up with this scenario in the late 90s as an early teen. Also, the very safe guess that whoever was playing Pop would be a teenage boy who wants to sleep.

If the player has more than eight gems (cheating gives you five at a time) the game cuts out here. If the player has fewer than eight, they'll go straight to the credits. If the player's managed to get all eight, they proceed to the secret ending from this point.

Cameos and closure that at least the smiley player went to heaven. It's a happy ending?

The cameos are pretty straightforward additions of ZZTers, family members, and singer Ani DiFranco. Cameos were really popular within the ZZT community. z2 even had a list people could post their preferred colors and character. Most games just had relatively pointless boards like this one. Some would have a cameo mid gameplay as a non sequitor. Still others would actually have their games plot entirely revolved around cameos of other ZZTers, both in the sense of "this is a game about ZZT and ZZTers" as well as "this is a game that has nothing to do with ZZT, but is full of ZZTers as the characters of its own story".

The linked Xoom page is pretty decently preserved and has a lot of information about Tucan and some descriptions of ZZT games he was working on including "Liquid", a sequel to Pop. Check out the cosmic melon

And that's Pop!

I went into this game remembering that it was a hit when it was released, and that I never got anywhere in it at the time. My thoughts on the game as a whole are really all over the place. The archived version of Tucan's site leads me to believe this game was made by a 13 year old, and when you realize that, it pulls up the game's flaws and makes what it does well more impressive. There's a very good sense of being brought to a strange world, and that world is built cohesively. The giant early dumps of information could be handled a bit better, but it does ensure that if the player takes what they're told to heart, they'll have a much easier time progressing through the tower grounds.

Visually, the game has a well-crafted aesthetic. Boards like the entrance hallway's inside/outside perspective really give a sense of depth compared to just a simple rectangle for a room. There's plenty of animation as well, birds flying away, drills operating, simple touches that help bring the boards to life.

I think my biggest complaint about Pop would have to be the constant backtracking. In this article I had the luxury of just cutting from one board to another, but in gameplay you'll find yourself running across large empty boards many times. It's made worse if you aren't taking advantage of the walkthrough as a wrong hunch on how to solve a puzzle can waste a few minutes of your time.

Pop's puzzles themselves also aren't the best. You'll have a harder time getting into the tower than anything else in the game. There are also the moments of inconsistencies like not being able to give the librarian the mango unless you lured the frog with it, or only being able to use the sink in one of the bathrooms to find the glyph in the soap when the other can't be interacted with at all.

There's a fun game here, but a slow one. The characters are fun to talk to, and there's a sense of humor about everything while also maintaining enough of a serious mystery. The ending is hyped up throughout the game, and I found myself curious about how the game would actually end. It kept me motivated enough, and just as the game began to wear thin it was time to end it.

The sidequest for the gems meanwhile, is a mess. First of all, the game is bugged so you can't actually get all the gems, but then most of the gems doing things repeatedly that do nothing over and over again until suddenly it works and you're rewarded. Nobody is going to kick a vending machine five times when kicking it a second time says the same thing as the first time. The guy who says 50 things may be pointless, but there's at least knowledge that every time you talk to him, you get something different.

If you read through this before deciding to play Pop, well, there's not all that much to see that you haven't already here. It's a decently put together adventure game, a genre in ZZT that's a bit lacking, and that gives it an edge as something noteworthy. Playing along with the walkthrough can make the game move forward at a fast enough pace that it could certainly be an enjoyable experience just journeying through the strange dimension that Tucan created. Playing it blind I feel will really suck the excitement out of it.

For an amateur adventure game by a 13 year old, Pop does a pretty solid job, but pitting it against the adventure game genre as a whole would be asking too much of it.