Where can I get Pop?

Pop is available on z2 as well as playable in browser via Archive.org

For those who get stuck, a walkthrough by Foxman is also available.

Also take note that the game contains a programming error that must be fixed in order to obtain the secret ending, and a possible bug preventing the game from being completed in general which can be gotten around by typing "ZAP" at the cheat prompt (activated with the ? key).

Pop

Pop was Tucan's ZZT hit of the Summer of 98. An adventure game with tricky puzzles taking place in an environment I'd best describe as magical-surrealism. Like Deep December, it's a game with a lot of atmosphere, in this case taking place in a large tower on a tiny island in another dimension. The game was well received in its day, and went on to win a Game of the Month Award. It was also tucan's last ZZT release, though nothing indicates that it was necessarily intended to be such.

The game's text file describes Pop as a homage to ZZT's older days (it was only 7 at the time!), being inventory based and Kudzu-esque, and "a really sucky way to kill a few hours".

(Kudzu was another ZZT adventure where you mostly interacted with strange and usual people and things to solve puzzles)

The game's title screen opens with a flashing message on the bottom of the screen explaining that Pop is a game where you need no bullets or brain, and credits the game with a second author known as kabra-corn. I've never heard the name kabra-corn anywhere other than this game, and whoever this other person was, there's no clear remnants of them in ZZT's history today.

Upon starting the game, the player is taken to a menu of sorts. Lots of games opted to start on a menu rather than jump right into the game itself to allow for things like skippable introduction boards, credits, or game instructions that the player may or may not be interested in.

Tucan was nice enough to give some information about himself at the time of making the game. Thank goodness we no longer have to deal with preps with pagers in the 21st century. There's nothing too revealing here, just a typical teenager with ZZT as a unique outlet for creativity.

As is often the case, credits in ZZT games are just the author listed for everything except for the special thanks section. The mysterious kabra-corn goes uncredited on this screen. Several of the credited names list the other games which directly inspired Pop's creation.

There's also a shoutout for #darkdigital, which was the main ZZTer IRC channel at the time, which was hosted on AustNet despite the vast majority of ZZTers being from North America and Europe.

I also love the promise of writing down the music that was listened to during the creation of the game. Listing what CDs were listened to, and what food was eaten became a common thing to include in the credits for 24 Hours of ZZT contest entries. This is the first I've seen it done in a regular game.

There's an inaccessible board in the game's file which does list this music. It includes Beck, Jimi Hendrix, and The Velvet Underground among a few others.

The last menu section to explore is the information on the game itself, what its goals were, how its name came to be, and lastly an explanation of the game's inventory system

And about that inventory. ZZT doesn't have any innate inventory system beyond keeping track of ammo, torches, gems, and keys. However, by turning ZZT's cheats into a gameplay feature it was possibly to loosely recreate the sort of thing you'd expect from a classic LucasArts or Sierra adventure.

Typing a ? during gameplay in ZZT opens up a cheat menu, and +>flag< could be used to set a flag. On every single room in the game an object checks in a loop if the flag "i" is set, and if so, it opens a list of items you have, allowing you to select one to use on whatever you're standing next to.

The ?+i system was used in several ZZT games (and a few action games would have you reload a gun with ?+r), but was relatively uncommon. Actually typing the command got tedious quickly, and if you made a mistake and typed ?+o instead, you'd set another flag and have to clear it with ?-o.

ZZT only supports 10 flags, so games which used this system had to make sure you never got more than 9 items at a time (as the 10th was needed for the "i" flag itself), and would have their flow designed around which items you might still have. If an 11th flag was set, it would overwrite the 10th flag, leaving you stuck with a now missing item.

Let's take a look at how the code is structured for such a game with this new ZZT scroll technology

You can see that the inventory code checks for more flags and if they're found brings up an interactive hyperlink the player can select which jumps to the :r or :s labels to use them. From there, #all:rock will tell every object on the board that if they have a :rock label in their code to jump to it. For objects that don't, nothing happens and they continue executing the code they've been running already.

If an object has a :rock label, it then tells the inventory object to jump to the :loop label and then does whatever it does when you try to use a rock on it. If nothing tells the inventory to jump back to :loop, it will go through it's /i statements which tell it to idle for a cycle, and eventually hit #stupid, jumping itself to the :stupid label and letting the player know that whatever they tried didn't do anything.

It's a cool little engine that shows what sort of mindset you need to have to write ZZT-OOP. You're constantly sending label jumps to other objects back and forth and reacting to that.

Of course, in most cases the thing you're interacting with is right next to the player to begin with and you could just have the player touch it and bring up a list of items to use on it there, but that's not nearly as flashy.

With the game's mechanics explained, it's time to actually play some Pop!

The player is dropped in atop the lavender tower with an empty inventory next to an art piece consisting of four globes, three of which have notches in them. One of those notches has been filled with clay. This piece is known as the ya'yono vekka, as displayed in the corner of the screen.

In Pop, every board has a title which is displayed to the player in a corner somewhere. It's a nice way to help the player navigate the tower, giving a concrete way to reference any room no matter how abstract its design may be.

With only one way to proceed, the player heads to the outside of a library. There are some plants in the corner which do nothing, but are internally named as plants. I assumed it was some sort of debris in this case. The sign also states the entrance leads to a library and the player comments on being surprised to find it written in English.

Inside the library is the game's first lore dump. Pop has quite a lot to read from books as a method of world building, and suffers from a case of telling rather than showing, but reading through everything you find does help you make sense of future puzzles and gives a lot more insight into the dimension the player's been trapped in.

Talking with the person that's busy reading offers no help, as they're too invested in their book to bother speaking with the player.

Several books line the shelf, and you can read every last one of them. Don't feel obligated to read them top to bottom here. Though important in actual gameplay, they can definitely be skimmed here.

The mythology book is a bit meaningless. I'm not sure if a nimby is a Not In My Back Yard. "Yapok" is a name drop of the ZZT game Yapok Sundria.

The second book gives the necessary backstory for the game. In short, curious creatures are taken from their dimension to this one where mysterious "watchers" are entertained by those who search the tower for an escape. A keykeeper title is given to those who show an especially noticeable amount of curiosity, essentially putting them in charge of the tower's upkeep. Nobody has ever found an exit, and nobody has been to the tower's ground floor.

The second book also goes on to describe the creatures found within the tower. This is less of an information dump, and more of hints on how to solve some of the puzzles later on with some sillier entries for humor as well.

The last book is a sixteen page diary by Jenner, the tower's 10th and current keykeeper.

The keeper's diary in interesting as it drops so many hints for the game's puzzles that it's very much like its own subtle walkthrough for much of the game. To summarize, jenner and isla were brought to the tower together, and actually managed to find the exit. Isla ran out and jenner stayed behind, having grown tolerant of life in the tower's dimension. Eventually one of the watchers discovered jenner and made them the new keykeeper. Upon learning that exiting normally means certain death, and that an alternate means of exiting safely could be created jenner planned their escape.

Continuing deeper into the library brings the player to a large bookshelf. The use of half solid characters in varying colors like this was a very common way to create bookshelves. In a bit of an issue with continuity, the player immediately comments on not being able to find a dictionary, but no dictionary has been mentioned, until investigating the torn out pages of a diary in the corner.

The player is thus informed about a dictionary that will let them communicate with those who only speak izanuoylrak'ian. It also provides a bit of insight onto the ya'yono vekka seen at the start of the player's journey. This diary also reiterates the importance of the eight gems which can be found in the game in order to obtain the special ending.

As we'll see, obtaining the eight gems without using a walkthrough or peeking in the editor is a gargantuan task. Even Foxman who wrote the game's walkthrough admitted to not knowing where one of the gems is. I'm confident that nobody got the secret ending without cheating in some way.

In order to find the dictionary, it may be wise to ask the librarian for some help.

And with that the player gets their first task. Find a mango, receive a dictionary. The back of the library contains nothing of interest, just a few open books on a shelf. It's time to move on down the tower.

The southwest tower board foreshadows some lower balconies that the player will eventually be able to explore. On the current level, there's a large shrub and a creature standing near it.

One thing worth pointing out here, is the interesting shading on the tower displayed here. It uses the standard ZZT fade of solid -> normal -> breakable -> water -> repeat which is used normally in the skyline in the background, but on the tower itself it's handled a little differently. There are these sort of vertical seams created which help add some roundness to the shape of the tower. This is done by taking advantage of how normal walls and water tiles are the inverse of each other graphically. So a dark purple on dark blue normal looks almost but not exactly like a dark blue on dark purple water. This creates the seam when you put the two next to each other and is a really cool effect that I don't think I've seen used anywhere else in this manner.

The entrance to the main hub of the tower is the next screen. This room also has the first solvable puzzle, and immediately requires you to get into Pop's mindset. The game's included text file even tells you how to solve it, which is generous because it's already not the most intuitive solution.

Investigating the statue brings up a few interesting choices of what to do to it. You can go down the list and get various reactions, but until you insult it enough, it won't do anything. ZZT games rarely required repeated interactions like this so even just getting the statue to wake up can be a challenge. And when it does, you begin a fortunately slow chase.

With the statue slowly chasing the player, they'll have to move over to a large drill, activate it, and lure the statue to its demise. All of this is a very elaborate method of obtaining a rock. The player can also activate the drill in advance, but the statue does move slowly enough that it's not necessary to pace back and forth across the board for added safety.

Murder count: 1

Rather than proceed inside the tower, I continued down the path. There's a lot to take in on this board. Like the dead body! But first let's get ourselves killed by a coke machine.

Yes, a second game with coke machines in it. Unlike Deep December's commitment to brand ideals, in the world of Pop, vending machines can be far deadlier.

You can safely spit in it though.

Next in line is a parakeet. Just like the statue and coke machine there's a variety of options to choose from.

Talking to the parakeet makes the dead body up ahead go from suicide to murder. Attempting to kill the parakeet yourself is met with a message about how it refuses to give you the chance. You're also unable to offer it any food regardless of what's in your inventory.

Offering it a gem which you don't have will cause it to fly away, which it actually does by moving up and across the screen to the edge before disappearing, which is a pleasant detail rather than simply making the object #die and vanish on the spot.

If the player does have a gem, the parakeet will take it before leaving, thus preventing the special ending from being possible. It's a pretty needless design decision.

The victim is revealed to be a maid, and the circumstances of her death are mysterious, but will ultimately go unexamined in the player's quest for the exit.

The last board of the tower's exterior is the guava groves. This board has quite a bit to interact with despite its small accessible area.

Firstly is the goal of the dictionary quest, a mango on the tree. Unfortunately there's no way to remove it currently.

Next is this viewing lens. Without any gems there's not really anything the player can do with it yet either.

Attempting to pick the mushroom causes the hûdû atop the tree to run down and bite you for trying to steal their mushroom. So we are 0 for 3. What a productive trip to the guava groves. Time to backtrack and enter the tower proper.

The board has a really cool perspective, simultaneously showing both the inside and outside of the tower. It uses transporters which blend into the walls to let the player transition from the outer section to the inner.

Talking to the gatehouse-keeper gives you a prompt to give him your name. Each option gets a slightly different response, but none of them have any effect on how the conversation proceeds.

There's quite a conversation to be had with the gatekeeper. Again the dictionary is stressed as being something to get sooner rather than later. There's also the mention of the mushrooms blocking the actual entrance and the weasel that's been tricking justice.

This leads to the next puzzle. In order to balance justice's scales, something needs to weigh down the lighter one. This is where the rock from the statue comes in.

With the mushrooms gone, the player can now enter the tower, though two of the passages are blocked.

On the carpet at the entrance, is a large piece of cheese and a rat quite interested in it, but other than that there's no interaction between the two objects.

What might appear to be a passage on the painting is in fact an inscription, revealing it to be a painting by isla to jenner. Jenner's diary mentioned that isla had been able to send messages from their home dimension into the tower's since the two were aligned. The hint given here isn't readily apparent, but will come into play later.

It turns out if you look at the inscription a second time, you'll find out there's a note on the back of it which mentions that the two of them had a secret room in the library and that isla has a surprise there for jenner.

Some ZZT games would put passages on picture frames as a way to take the player to a board where they could view the painting and nothing else which is what I was expecting here. Using the same character as a passage for this object isn't the ideal choice, but there's no harm done here in expecting a passage and just getting a message instead.

The worker in the upper right has been waiting for jenner who hasn't been around and as is the theme with Pop, presents a variety of dialog options to the player.

drinking on the job, eh?

what exactly *does* that machine do?

how'd you get into this tower place?

the boss says it's break-time...

Telling the worker it's time for a break results in them rushing out of the room, taking the player along for the ride if they happened to be below the worker when they talked to him

When they leave, the passage sound effect plays! More fun little details.

With the worker gone, the player can now pick up a bottle of oil that was previously inaccessible. After doing so, I follow the path to the only new exit, the cafeteria.

The cafeteria has lots of people to talk with, most of which are pretty inconsequential.

The table in the top left has something a bit more meaningful.

Again the player is told that they need to give up in order to actually escape the tower. Bodhran the otter is constantly changing colors as well in this screen, so attention is easily drawn to them. But the most important conversation you can have in the cafeteria is with the person located in the lower right.

How much of the Pop's story is meant to be taken as metaphor and how much is actually breaking the fourth wall is purposely ambiguous. It's a ZZT game, but are the watchers actually aware it's a ZZT game?

All in all, while providing more information on your quest, the cafeteria offers nothing to the player to help them actually complete it. Though, by entering the tower the player did pick up that bottle of oil which can be put to use immediately.

Running all the way back to the guava groves, coating the branch with oil, and then attempting to pick the mushroom again causes the hûdû to slip and crash on the ground.

This time the player gets to keep the mushroom, and with the hûdû incapacitated, the player can climb to the top of the tree for a stick.

With the branch you can fill one of the two notches on the ya'yono vekka, though what this does isn't made apparent to the player right away. Being able to do this to begin with is hinted at in one of jenner's diary entries where they mention getting their walking stick stuck in one of the globes.

Back inside the tower, the effects of filling a globe are made apparent as one of the doors blocking further passage disappears.

The path winds a bit, without a whole lot to interact with. The sign by the blue passage is written in izanuoylrak'ian, only saying "uroos maluroos". If you go all the way back to the diary pages found in the library, you'll be told that this translates to "the murderers". Naturally, the player should go inside.

On entering the murder room, a group of people are seated around a dining table and polite request you to bring the soup and enjoy a meal with them.

The player can't actually take the soup until it's been properly flavored. The puzzle is kind of arbitrary since it explicitly tells you to add a mushroom to the soup, and in order to be able to access this room to begin with the player has to have already gotten the branch from the guava groves, and if the player can get the branch, they can get the mushroom as well.

Murder count: 4

With the murdered dead, it's time to figure out why they died.

Unsurprisingly, it's because of the random mushroom you decided to add to their soup. Don't add random wild mushrooms to soup! Though, it paid off in this case what with the room being full of murderers who intended to poison the player's centipede dinner. Inspecting one of the murderers does net you a knife, which will pretty logically allow the player to cut them a mango and get their dictionary finally.

It's impossible to be killed by the murderers since you aren't allowed to pick up the soup without putting the mushroom into it. Also if you have the dictionary you can use it on the sign to reveal that it's full of murderers, but since you need to solve this room's puzzle before being able to get the dictionary it's a bit moot by that point.

Next up on the path is a bouncing booger.

Here the tower opens up, offering three new paths to take in the second checkerboard room. This room has a large fountain of water in the center of it.

Conveniently, bathrooms for numerous species from several dimensions can all be boiled down into male/female. I opt to explore the men's room first.

Inside the restroom are various urinals intended for the different creatures residing in the lavender tower. The stall contains a roll of toilet paper, and er...

A white cabbage that is named toilet, but will never have its name shown in the game itself since its messages are one-liners and don't require a big text box.

Oh, there's also a dead guy who died while brushing his teeth.

You can also pick up a bar of soap here. You'll need it for the women's room, but there's no particular reason why it's not possible to do what you do there in here.

Moving to the women's bathroom, it's pretty similar, though lacking a corpse and it only has one urinal. Examining the women's room urinal results in the player wondering what strange creature could possibly need a urinal while also being a girl. ZZT games in 1998 created by early teenagers were not the most progressive in terms of gender representation.

There's also a whole mess of floss you can take.

Our puzzle here is to dissolve the soap in the water and obtain the glyph that was trapped inside. Think back to jenner's diary again, where they mentioned that they lost the glyph required to enter the lab while in the soap factory. See, it all makes sense. At least more sense than not being able to interact with the sink in the men's room at all. It would've been easy enough to put everything in one bathroom, and either make it unisex (which is probably a good idea when dealing with creatures from several dimensions) or just have the player character refuse to enter one of them. Though, I suppose the player is never gendered in this game! Who's to say which bathroom they should to using?

Bathrooms aside, the balconies takes us to the lower area seen early on in the game where the only thing to interact with is a post.

This sort of marks the moment where a lot of the game's puzzles and solutions are right next to each other.

Talking to this individual gives you some information on the area up ahead having a reazle infestation, and reminds you about their love of shiny things, which can also be found by reading one of the books in the library

Sure enough, the next room is full of reazles. Tucan was nice enough to stop the player from getting themselves killed, and you're blocked by an invisible object until you find something to deal with the reazles. This is a good a time as any to do some cleanup on the boards which have bene visited before.

Heading back to the main path, it's possible to cut down the shrubbery with the assassin's knife and pick up a gold coin.

Unsurprisingly, it can also be used to cut the mango from the tree. The obvious thing to do is give it to the librarian right away, but it also serves a second purpose here.

Investigating the area near the arrow lets you interact with the frog. You can then lure it over and skin it for its poisonous hide.

This puzzle isn't the best. If you try to turn in the mango before getting the frog skin the game won't let you. The books in the library mention the frogs loving mangoes, but it would work just as well if the frog didn't need to be lured since you still need the knife to begin with to get its skin. If the player doesn't remember the connection between frogs and mangoes, they can easily find themselves arbitrarily unable to solve the dictionary puzzle.

Once the player has the frog skin, they're free to give away the mango and get their dictionary. I like how the dark cyan book actually vanishes when you take the dictionary off the shelf.

Now's also the time to move the stick and explore the other passageway in the tower.

After a several boards long trip, the right side passage in the tower takes the player to this green room.

There's not a whole lot to do here. The tubular object can be adjusted, but doesn't do anything. The guard prevents the player from going to the clearly marked exit, and then there's the guy that says fifty things.

Remember those 8 gems for the secret ending? Here's one of them. Just talk to this guy until he runs out of things to say! It's tedious! One of his lines mentions being worried about hitting the 32 KB limit. Since this game predates external editors, there's no way to find out how large your board is unless you export it to its own file. To make matters worse, though ZZT's file format will support a 32 KB board, in practice ZZT has issues with boards at around 20 KB. There's no real exact size threshold to avoid crossing, but 20 KB became the mark to keep things under. If you go beyond this limit, you'll increase the chances of your board being corrupted when saving, or objects having their code randomly deleted. Lots of work has been lost this way.

With that, the player's seen everything they can prior to passing through the reazle caves. It's time to head back there.

Using the coin found in the shrubs, the player can gain safe passage through the cave as all the reazels run off to take a good long look at the coin.

The burial caves mark the start of the game's next segment. The torches flicker between a blue and white flame by #putting blue and white water around themselves. I guess outside of ZZT "use water to represent fire" isn't a common technique. The sign has quite a bit to say about the burial caves

The help desk is not particularly useful.

Do people today know what nmiaow is? It's on Urban Dictionary, and doing a quick google search brings up a 2002 thread on Digital MZX asking if the term originated in the ZZT/MZX communities and spread to the greater internet or came from somewhere else and spread into standard ZZT/MZX lexicon. It sounds like it's a ZZT/MZX thing.

Nmiaow stands for "Not meant in an obscene way". Now you know. I always pronounced it as nuh-meow.

The wine cellar is next on the tour. There are a few barrels with various wines which can be sampled, and a handy wine list to learn about what the player might be sampling.

At least if you have an izanouylrak'ian dictionary. Fortunately, we do.

With knowledge of each wine casket, the player can begin drinking. The water is harmless, and you can't drink the mango wine as it's blocked off. (Though a rat stumbling across the room is drunk from it). If you drink the vendace without drinking any kolfthas beforehand, you'll die instantly. If you do remember to drink your kolfthas first...

And now the player's in a hallucinogenic sequence! They'll only stay on this board for a limited time before being teleported back to reality. This entire sequence is optional, but you can get two gems out of it.

Firstly by examining your backpack twice, you'll receive one gem. This is the one that went undiscovered in Foxman's walkthrough. If you push the six plastic statues in the correct order of iguana, otter, nimby, dragon, yapok, and ocelot, you'll get the second gem. There's also a lion enemy wandering around, but there's no real reason to not just take the hit and be able to work the statues in peace. If you hit the statues in the wrong order they all reset. The time limit on this room is tight, but nothing too difficult.

Once the sequence ends, you're whisked back to the wine cellar proper and no longer able to drink any more wine.

Now sober, it's time to enter the crypt. On the tables are various mummies of each of the tower's previous key keepers. All of them have a coin half set in their mouth. Except for one...

Here's the programming error that prevents you from getting all eight gems! This object tries to jump to a label that's already been "zapped" in its code, so there is no label to jump to and the object errors out. Oddly, the game is uploaded on z2 as "version 2" and one would think that this would be a very easy bug to catch in testing, but it remains in place.

There's also a plaque ready for whenever jenner dies, and a few other plaques that have yet to be engraved for future key keepers. Oh hey we also get a pronoun for him.

Entering the second half of the room with the dictionary conveniently translates the writing making this puzzle quite obvious. If the writing isn't translated, the player won't even try to use the glyph. The rest of the room consists of vases filled with a variety of things ranging from plants, to diamonds, and an otter in the center of the room admiring the quality handwriting.

The final room to visit in the tower is the evil lab, and there's a lot to take in. The red and white objects make up a stretch-o-matic, which the player is informed can be used to stretch animal hides. To the right of it is a drill-o-matic which can be used to hollow out something.

In the upper corners there's one body suspended in a blue jelly, and other shattered tube with a dead body. The lower left corner has a mysterious and very evil scientist working on something/

In the lower right, we can find the patient and his sister, crying about the boy's condition.

The player has all the items necessary to make use of the machinery here. First the frog skin on the stretch-o-matic and then the bone on the drill-o-matic

The blow pipe comes with a large disclaimer about its special use case. It's a very convoluted system that should really just use :shot and nothing more, but as we'll see there is a specific reason for the raising/lowering requirement. It also has the issue of softlocking the game if you use it in the wrong place.

The obvious solution of shooting the doctor with the dart is not even an option to try.

Murder count: 5

Six if you want to count her brother's certain demise.

It's a bit of an odd scene, being that it's completely optional. You can just choose to get involved and kill the scientist on the assumption that he's evil.

Anyways, with that board complete, the player now has everything they need to escape from the tower! There are still four gems that haven't been picked up, so now's the time to do the final set of backtracking and collect the rest.

One skipped gem is in the coke machine. You can get it by kicking the machine five times. Every other time you kick it, it just says that nothing happens.

Spending four gems on the viewfinder in the guava groves nets you a fifth gem.

Running all the way back up the tower to the ya'yono vekka, is this sixth gem, which was hinted at in key keeper jenner's diary.

Our last gem is located in the library where you can sit on one of the shelves.

That all adds up to 7 gems. Don't forget that a programming error prevents the player from picking up the 8th among the key keeper mummies. All that's left is to finally make it to the exit.

Back at the room with the exit, it's time to do something about the guard. Just raise the blow-pipe and...

And this is why there's that weird mechanic where you have to raise and lower the blow-pipe.

Using the weird device to deflect their shot, the player can now exit the tower! Or at least, if Tucan remembered to have the guard object #die they could. You have to ?ZAP past him. I still have no idea how these two really obvious bugs weren't found, especially for a game which had an updated release!

Time to see the mystery of the lavender tower revealed in the game's ending

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.