Where can I get Oaktown?

Oaktown is available on z2 as well as playable in browser via Archive.org.
You can also explore the world yourself on the Museum of ZZT Public Beta.

Oaktown

Today's game is Oaktown, a 1993 release by Shaun Taylor and Brian Keeler, a game selected based entirely on the Museum of ZZT's file viewer. When working on the site, most of the time I can just pick a world at random to use when testing the file viewer, which means picking a letter and choosing a game. Taylor and Keeler's Oaktown just so happens to be the first game listed under the letter O, and when I was browsing through its boards it looked like I had found a ZZT game which looked like it would be a lot of fun to play through.

It looked very traditional: explore various areas of a town, collect a few keys, and escape the town via the airport or something. The town itself had a lot of charm, and I just really wanted to play it.

And you know what? Oaktown really does have a lot of charm! Its a really fun world to explore for awhile. It has charm, but it does not have ammo. It does not have health. Oaktown starts off at its peak and only sinks lower and lower in quality as you try to play it. By the end I just wanted it to be over.

So let's take a look at what OakTown does right, and how its flaws drag down what would likely otherwise have been an early classic of ZZT.

The world's title screen takes an interesting approach. Most ZZTers would promptly erase ZZT's yellow borders placed on each new board. Newer creators might leave them behind, but Oaktown leans into it. The borders are made thicker on the sides, committing to them. With the yellow border I'd expect nothing from this game, but just by thickening some walls, the expectations for the game go up.

The title itself shows a nice city skyline in breakables, and conveyors below rotate gems along a path giving the appearance of flashy lights you'd find on an old-timey Las Vegas sign. It looks pretty nice in motion.

The game's authors are two friends who made this game together, and thus created "Pacific Systems". The game is also considered the first episode out of three, following a typical shareware model. The other two episodes aren't on any archives, and who knows if they even actually exist. Oaktown is the only known release by these two or Pacific Systems.

Oaktown opens with a blend of plot and information on the game's authors. The story is pretty vague, one of the game's programmers has gone rogue and is messing things up in the town. Unlike Town of ZZT, there's no explicit goal of collecting keys or anything, just a plea to find Brian who could be anywhere.

The starting board uses its otherwise unneeded space to give the player some advice and show off the game's name in large letters. It's a bit like what would be done by Aceland the following year with its hybrid boards of art and gameplay.

In an unexpected twist, the toilet can't be used!

The player has an ill-trained dog moving around in the laundry room. Searching the dryer gives a few gems as loose change. More gems can be found by rummaging through the couch cushions in the player's living room.

There's no television, but there is a stereo system which offers two songs to listen to, both of which are taken straight from Tim Sweeney's original worlds.

The fridge is full of rotten food, which will take away health when the player opts to eat any of it.

Except for the bran muffin which induces the need for a bowel movement.

Toilet puzzle solved. This game makes you work for it.

Out in the hallway, Zeke, the rock and roll loving stoner(?) informs the player of the mayor's decree preventing travel outside of town. Perhaps this is the work of Brian?

Stepping outside onto the streets of Oaktown, the game's visuals start off strong. Numerous colorful buildings line the street, all of different heights and using simple shading to give them an effective sense of depth.

The sidewalks are made of breakable walls (and the player can't shoot on these town boards), which gives Taylor and Keeler the opportunity to have doors on buildings look consistent, with their accessibility being what determines which buildings can be entered vs which are just for decoration.

The streets have life, with some street dancers and a boombox outside, but also other objects which are people going about their business who will walk to the edge of a screen and disappear, making a trip to somewhere else in town. It breathes a lot of life into Oaktown, which is especially necessary for a town of its size.

The dancers will perform for the player for a gem, but can also be attacked if the player wants to be a jerk. Punching the bro results in the two dancers attacking the player for a bit, but no lasting repercussions

Paying for the dance results in the cyan dancer moving around in a plus shape, and some more music made with ZZT's "drum" sound effects. The player is also given a password, though for what exactly is currently unknown.

Down the road is city hall, where the person from the previous board walks past the guards and into the building.

The player unfortunately can't enter the building, and needs to find an alternative entrance to city hall.

The center of Oaktown is packed with buildings, two of which are stores the player can enter to buy supplies. These stores share a board, which comes off looking pretty sparse.

The prices are... not good. And the ammo dealer is overcharging us! A lot of money will be spent in these stores throughout the game, and every gem that can be scrounged up is essential.

To the west is the Oak Zoo. Oaktown offers some player freedom in which areas they'd like to explore in which order, but unlike Town of ZZT, it opts for fewer locations with larger paths.

The vast majority of ZZT's enemies being animals means zoos are a common location in early ZZT games which still relied on them for their action scenes.

It costs five gems to take a tour of the zoo and good god is this board visually noisy! Bears, boulders, sliders, ammo, gems, all strewn about everywhere. Bears in ZZT don't move until the player is with a certain distance of them, which makes them typically the easiest enemy to fight. It's a good thing too since my ammo is so limited.

Getting through most of the room clears out a lot of the visual clutter. Past a certain point the player gets cut off from the left half of the room and locked in the right. The second passage towards the middle of the screen actually leads to this same board and is used as a crude checkpoint.

ZZT offers a board property that the editor labels as "Re-enter when zapped". When set to yes, if the player takes damage by bullet or creature, they're warped back to the tile they entered the room on. This second passage updates those coordinates to the new passage's location preventing the player from having to traverse the entire board again.

And it's a good thing it's here, since there's a duplicator creating more bears. The more time spent wandering cleared sections of the maze, the more bears can be spawned.

This part here is just cruel. There are no other false gems like this in the game either. The only way you'd be able to identify a gem was actually an object like this would be if there was a boulder or slider to push it with, since the only alternative is that if you shoot a gem it will be destroyed.

The board ends with the tour guide warning about the next board being full of lions instead.

I'm a big fan of the TOURISTs CAGE. The good news here is that most of the lions on this board are just objects. Some are chasing around the other tourists, and after shooting them leads to this incredible dialog:

I'm pretty sure this is a Dril tweet circa 1993.

Another human in the cage is Shaun Taylor, one of the game's programmers. He reiterates the goal of finding Brian, but offers no advice on how to actually go about it.

But you darn well better agree to help out lest you get this amazing advice and an instant game over!

The last person in the cage will give you the key to escape it and explore the lion village.

Some of the lions are spectating the cages, turning it into a zoo of their own.

Oaktown gives the player a lot of opportunities to be violent towards random objects, and it never ends well. Asking to learn from him gives the player a quest to obtain a "Mystical Torch" in order to leave the lion's realm.

Oaktown has a few moral choices like this one throughout the game. The player can steal some gems and they will get away with it, but they'll lose points for doing so. Meanwhile, if they act responsibly, they'll receive bonus points instead.

A few other lions add some flavor the environment and they do a good job of it.

There's a restaurant selling some meat the player can use to regain 16 health, which at 4 gems is a decent enough price. Pond water however is dirty and results in the player losing a single point of health.

Lastly there's a shooting range that the player can either buy ammo from or play a simple minigame to try and get more gems.

The shooting gallery features a target that moves up and down in a set pattern. The timing is unfortunately rather precise, and the reward for a hit is only a single gem. Missing the target instantly ends the minigame until more money is paid.

Even if a player can reliably shoot the target, the rewards are too small to be worthwhile. You're still consuming ammo so even after breaking even in gems, you still need to spend money to replenish the ammo it took to hit the target in the first place. In fact, more than 20 hits on the target are needed to turn a profit of a single ammo.

And you'll need 20 gems to be able to proceed with the game.

This dark room is a long winding path to get the Mystical Torch. There's not much to it, but I did manage to run out of ammo three-quarters through and have to run back through the dark to buy more.

The lack of ammo is already hurting this game, but it was still early enough that I could brush it off as me not having been expected to enter the zoo first. Still poor design, but design that could be worked around by having picked a different location to explore first.

With the torch obtained, the player can return it to the lion king king of red lions ruler of the lions and procure an exit to the next zoo exhibit, but there's still an unexplored treasure room to pillage.

The treasure room is another action board, though one that is optional. With how starved I am for resources, it looked like I'd be able to get through it with more ammo than I started with at the very least.

Immediately the player need to run through a gauntlet of spinning guns, and there's nothing the player can do but hope for good luck getting through unscathed as there are no safe tiles to stand on that aren't being shot at by a gun.

From there the player will have to run a short relay to some buttons to open up further passage through the treasure room, keeping in mind that there are three duplicators on screen producing more and more lions as time goes on.

There's also this guy who starts talking about how he likes cats.

It uh, takes a rather unexpected turn.

Once in the main portion of the room it becomes a test of the player's ability to hit lions without wasting too much ammo in the process. Eventually the player will make it into the treasure room and be able to pick up the supplies as well as a bonus of 40 gems from the lion's treasure.

It's still not over however, as the player will need to backtrack through the room again.

And that didn't pay off at all. I left the treasure room with one fewer ammo than I started with, and with nearly 200 health fewer than before.

Next up is the snake cage. The lion doesn't say anything when you present him with the torch, just quietly opens up the door to the next room.

The snake cage is the final section of the zoo and is officially where my playthrough fell apart completely. It's another maze, with another person who talks about snakes the same way that guy from earlier talking about lions.

Despite my best efforts, it became clear that I did not have the resources needed to get through the board without cheating. The big boa was too big to shoot and too long to take a bunch of damage to get through.

The room is a single tile wide, ensuring that every snake meant taking 10 points of damage. Duplicators meant that there was simply not enough ammo to get through.

I gave in and zapped straight to the exit bypassing the rest of the screen entirely.

And just like that, the player is unceremoniously dumped back outside of the zoo. (Okay, turns out there's a gem that turns into a key in there that I missed, but at first I was unsure if the entire zoo was optional. After all, I had no guidance other than "find Brian" and now I've learned he's not in the zoo.)

In the southwest corner of Oaktown is the airport, with its very tiny little runway. The player can't yet enter, for reasons unstated and on par with a Pokémon game for roadblocks.

The southernmost section of town has nothing of interest but a locked gate. The player won't be leaving town anytime soon while the mayor has forbid it.

On the center right screen (I went back to the center to spend my gems on supplies), is the town bar and part of an American football field. The two objects out on the field will shoot a ball back and forth at each other for a fun little detail.

The bar is a private club, and requires the password provided by the dancers from earlier to be let in.

Lending the drunk some money foreshadows that the park won't be any better for supplies than the zoo was. Things aren't looking good for my enjoyment of Oaktown.

The bar offers a few items, beer will restore 1 health for _three_ gems, (The bartender cites a tax on beer,) a meal will restore 4, and beernuts are just a waste of money.

The bar's other patrons are just for flavor.

In the top right corner of the bar is a pay phone! The first time the player interacts with it they'll find a gem in the coin return and make the first call for free, but if they want to see the others they'll each cost a gem.

They're all of course basic crank calls for Stu Piddiot, Hugh Jass, and Isabelle Ringing. Thankfully the bartender never makes the connection that the call is coming from inside the bar.

So the bar ultimately serves as a third store to purchase health from, but there aren't nearly enough gems to go around for the supplies the player will need to complete Oaktown without cheating.

The northeast corner of town contains a really fun sequence with these two neighboring buildings.

The savings and loan has been closed down and the security system is broken...

The ACME co. warehouse meanwhile is full of ruffians, some ammo, and a very convenient bomb.

I expected the explosion to just wipe out a huge chunk of the wall since it all appeared to be made of breakables, but most of it is an object. There is consistency in the breakables representing the tops of the walls being replaced with solids are the player is now seeing the sides. It's a mix of good detail work but also creates the appearance of a perfectly clean break in the wall from the explosion.

Though the bank's electronic security system's wall blinks on and off, the tigers seem to be working just fine.

At least until ZZT's glitch with blink walls mangles things.

The player is free to rob the bank and gets a decent amount of money from their crimes.

The final corner of town consists of the rest of the town's football field and entrances to its lake and park.

The lake is locked away behind two doors, one from the zoo which has been skipped so far, and the other to be obtained in the Oaktown park. There's also a slime sewer with a release lever that hopefully nobody will pull because that would be awful.

With no place left to go, it's time to check out Oak Park, a massive series of dark rooms.

As soon as I stepped in, my mind was blown. This looked so cool! Oaktown does something that no other ZZT game has here: made a dark board interesting to look at.

It's using the Kangaroo Effect in 1993 when the concept wouldn't be codified and named proper until 2007, a good fourteen years before its "discovery"!

Because the kangaroo effect is not actually the most descriptive name, perhaps an explanation is in order: In dark rooms, as expected, most elements are obscured by darkness, with two exceptions, torches, and passages. Normally in a dark room the player has no real sense of direction as they can only see what's in actively within their torch's light radius. By having the outer bounds of a room filled with torches or passages it's possible to create a boards that can easily be navigated even in darkness.

For the Kangaroo Effect, specifically the idea is to use torches/passages with a matching foreground and background color to make them appear as regular walls in darkness (and with a border of actual walls that will be hidden in darkness to prevent the player from picking them up or entering a passage).

Here the torches are used to represent a forested environment, just like the forest seen in Town of ZZT, but with darkness to create this absolutely striking looking appearance.

Of course, while I can gush about this area being the prettiest looking dark area I have ever seen in a ZZT world, it's going to be ruined by Oaktown's sense of gameplay balance.

Here's the board with the lights on, which makes it significantly more dull looking.

The park isn't quite as bad as the zoo, at least at first. I'm entering it with about a hundred more ammo than I had in the zoo at least, and the enemies are more safely sectioned off by the forest tiles.

The mysterious beta character is revealed to be a water fountain that gives the player some health, but only once as they've been sufficiently refreshed afterwards.

Making a good dark room is extremely difficult, but the mix of the kangaroo effect, as well as the forest preventing the player from being sniped by tiger bullets from across the room does quite a lot to make things more approachable.

I was so caught up in how nice these boards looked that I didn't even bother to take screenshots with the lights cheated back on. The good news, there's not exactly much to see. Lots of forest, with pockets of various enemies.

The second board has a talking tree who rather than give investment advice like in Town of ZZT opts to instead talk about needing a forest key to leave. Near the tree is a scared man who's been stuck in the park without any torches.

If you help him out, you'll get a few torches. If you refuse, he not only takes away some points and shoots at you, but also drains your torches to zero. The morality is laid on a bit thicker here than in the zoo. You better help him or not interact with him at all.

He is competently programmed at least! If you don't actually have any torches to give he won't be upset and will just leave on his own.

The next board opens with a trap as the player is immediately (most likely) going to break through a forest tile and into the pocket of lions.

Up ahead is a river with a bridge to cross guarded by a single ruffian.

A little bit later, the same river winds requiring a second crossing, but this time the bridge is protected by a troll.

The toll is twenty gems, and attempting to kick his butt will result in getting shot a few times before making him disappear. Better to pay the toll.

Or at least, it would be if the troll was placed in a way that actually blocked the player's path. The player can just waltz on by.

The next board marks roughly the halfway point for the park. There's a transporter blocked by a white door with the key visible on the other side of the lake.

In addition to the ammo and gems scattered in the park (none of these torches are actually collectible), are some health objects which give 50 health back. The zoo had a few of these, but was much more difficult to get through. Here health has been holding fairly steady at least. My ammo is definitely approaching zero and I could only hope I'd be done with the park before running out again.

Wait, I lied. This one torch has a fake wall I accidentally walked into which let me collect it!

After reaching the white key, I get to turn around to discover where the transporter leads. While most of the earlier enemies had been shot, I did leave that giant centipede alone giving me something to sneak past another two times.

On this tiny island sits the forest key, which was said to be required to get out of here. With it, I can continue on the path I was following beforehand.

Immediately up ahead is the forest door. Though the park had a few optional areas so far, it's basically been a linear path to this point, and putting an extra door here really didn't add anything other than a small backtrack.

Ultimately though, I'm grateful that I didn't have to redo a huge chunk of the park because of a missing key or something.

Up ahead is finally the end of the forest. There are a few passages to enter and some mysterious percent signs up above the starting area.

They turn out to be some sort of berry bush which kills you for eating from it.

The board is cut in two by another river, and this time with no bridge to cross.

The other path leads to the den of the ruffian. Take a look at that ammo count and realize I have no chance to not have to cheat some more. Despite my upcoming doom, I at least got the relief of having a board that wasn't dark.

I almost did actually make it through without running out of ammo, but then the ruffians in this last room blocked the door preventing it from opening all the way. Shortly after zapping the door away I got myself killed by these last few ruffians.

My second attempt went a little better. Pulling the lever opened the final door to the leader of the ruffians, but meant backtracking through the gauntlet.

Where I promptly discovered that the only way to pass was to kill all the ruffian enemies remaining.

Having done that I was able to pass and learn that these gems were blocked by invisible walls and that I would be getting no healing here.

The leader of the ruffians calls the player out for destroying everything in the warehouse earlier, and lets them leave. It's very clear I'm a force to be reckoned with and not a single hit from death.

If the player hasn't done the warehouse the events unfold the same, but with a comment about how you killed everybody in the ruffian den instead.

The other end of the den has a few doors with some supplies behind them which are locked and can never be obtained. Great.

There's also a lever which allows the player to cross the river to the last portion of the park still unexplored.

The player then eats a beehive.

There's another building up ahead, this time a ranger station. There's a very weird design decision here where it's blocked off by invisible walls and requires a transporter to get inside.

The other transporter is right below, along with some sliders in case the player removes the forest tiles that block the transporter and would cause the player to just be transported to the tile above them instead of to the other side.

Inside the ranger station are yet more items that can't be obtained. The doors are locked with no way to unlock them. If the doors are shot, they're destroyed and revealed to have invisible walls behind them preventing access still.

The ranger at least gives the player one of the keys to the beach ending this area.

Outside, I'm left with almost no health, or ammo, or torches. Somehow I don't think doing the park first and then the zoo would have gone any better, to be able to get through any section requires buying a lot of supplies from the shops, and the player won't have the money until they go through one of these sections.

Oaktown has so much promise, but it keeps wearing me down more and more.

This was the point where I got stuck, and had to look at the game's code to discover the missing key in the zoo.

Backtracking through the zoo is rather unpleasant, and I just give in and zap through a bunch of walls to get this over with. My patience with this game has nearly ran out.

Shortly after stepping onto the dock, Brian appears and releases the sewer slime into the lake, ruining the water.

The next place to go isn't very obvious. The player can tunnel their way through the slime lake on to the next board. This is the only board in the town where the player can shoot making it easy to not realize it's even an option.

You better believe there are some ninja turtles living in the sewers of Oaktown. They all just move around randomly, though one of them pinned behind a slime gives you bonus points and pizza if you rescue him.

The bulk of the sewers consists of navigating a brief maze filled with short centipedes while trying to not get attacked by the sharks (described as sewer gators) in the water. There are two keys to pick up to finish the area, and both of them are green so there's some backtracking necessary due to the one key of each color limit.

The only way to proceed form here is through a sewage pipe, with no real idea where it will lead the player.

It turns out all of this was just a very elaborate way to get inside city hall.

Oaktown City Hall looks great. The zoo was busy, and the park had some nice visual touches, but this board is classic ZZT at its finest. There's a lot going on here, but the board doesn't feel cramped or chaotic. The line walls as pillars is a great effect that I can't recall having come across elsewhere, and it just looks like a fun board.

None of the toilets in the restroom have doors apparently, and the other person sitting on a toilet says they'd kill you right now if they weren't currently busy.

The top toilet offers some excellent star trek/toilet humor:

Despite just how much is going on here, I somehow missed a ton of it?

There's a small invisible maze full of fake keys and I apparently thought I had checked the red one and revealed it as fake, but it's very much an actual key.

The red key lets you into the room with ruffians who claim they're saboteurs deleting important records and they offer to pay you to detonate the bomb in the filing room. The reward is the yellow key to the security center.

In the security center you can steal an ID card from a sleeping guard, and use it to open the left wing of city hall where you'll run in with the good programmer of the game Shaun again.

The last area contains the town's actual mayor, who was imprisoned by Brian and another random captured woman who gives the player a kiss for being rescued.

But all of this is very easily missed as the white key obtained in the zoo opens up access to the mayor's office where the player will meet up with the evil programmer Brian.

Brian breaks through the wall and the player has to give chase. He also lets some bears and lions loose but they can easily be avoided.

And here we get to a split of three passages to chase Brian through. Oaktown has been a flawed game, but one with clear potential up to this point. Right around here the game starts going all over the place, and really loses its cohesion.

Any expectations of a non-linear chase go out the window as two of the Brians place locked doors in the way turning this segment into a strictly linear affair, and one with a needless invisible maze.

The chase is a gauntlet and gets very abstract. I'm not going to pretend the layout of Oak Zoo was anything like an actual zoo, but it was still a video game take on what a zoo could be. Here we chased Brian from city hall to whatever the heck this place is.

The author openly admits as such. This part of the game is needless, dull, and takes the player out of what feels like Oaktown and into "some boards I made in ZZT".

There's a run through some spinning guns, and what appears to be a dead end, but if you look closely, the invisible wall from the start of the room has been erased, allowed the player to turn around and now access the rest of the level.

This consists of getting through some blink walls, an invisible wall maze, and another maze where some walls are fake and some are normal walls. The reward for all of this is the yellow key to the next passage, and exit from this first room.

I head back, open the door, and enter the middle passage which leads me to...

This rather strange board consisting of a drawing of a stick figure with a gun, two dozen or so invisible enemies, and a bomb salesman.

So now the player has to run to the stick figure's crotch to hit the button while randomly being shot at by invisible and bullet immune enemies.

The bomb salesman can give the player a bomb, or reveal the enemies, but for an absolutely massive price by this game's standards. The bombs are more reasonable, but can't be moved very far, and if the salesman is caught in the explosion, they'll throw a star at the player.

It's a bad situation all around, but it gets worse when I pick up the key and find myself trapped by one of the enemies. Again they can't be shot, and ZZT doesn't let you shoot objects at point blank anyway. The invisible stalker's code makes it so that that if jammed into this position, they will lock up and never be able to get out due to having a line where they try to move randomly either east or west, and if they're blocked in both of those directions they'll keep trying forever, pinning the player.

After zapping my way out of a softlock, I take the red key and open the final passage, and am pleased to find there is no third board to go with the other two.

No doubt, back on the streets of Oaktown I can finally enter the airport, the only place left unexplored and a fitting place for Brian to be since he's been on the run.

Ha ha ha. No. I need to go back to the park because I missed picking a flower earlier.

I just plow through the forest again, turning on the lights everywhere to get this darn flower. At this point I want Oaktown to be over.

Entering the airport the player catches a glimpse of Brian heading towards one of the gates.

The first segment of the airport consists of a lost baggage claim, a gift shop, diner, and some newspapers. The newspapers plug "Oaktown 2: The Chase" which isn't exactly giving me high hopes for this game having a satisfying conclusion.

The shops serve as replacements for the ones in town which is important since once the player is in the airport they're unable to leave it. As always, the costs are overpriced.

The next portion of the airport consists of a whole lot of hare krishnas who will surround the player causing a game over. The solution to this puzzle is of course to open fire in an airport. Shooting one of them will cause them to panic and attempt to run away from the player.

Entering either of the bathrooms brings back painful memories of the sewers, but you do get more Star Trek/toilet humor!

The woman on the toilet isn't happy with a man in the women's room. The player's gender has gone uncommented on up until this point, and it's a bit strange for it to be revealed now, but I doubt the authors were explicitly trying to keep the gender ambiguous.

The men's room is much more dull with nothing more than an alka-seltzer joke.

Attempting to enter the security station results in a tripwire alerting all of security and causing them to begin shooting at everything. There's one guard who doesn't attack because they're stuck with a desk job and thus aren't allowed to see any action. They complain about this, but they're also the only survivor.

The lever allows access to the rest of the board, which is of course loaded with yet more invisible mazes, a heart that can't be picked up, and also no exit? I have no idea if I missed something, but it really doesn't look that way.

I zap my way through. I know there can't be much more of this game left. It's got to be over soon. There's a row of blink walls and star throwing spinning guns, and it's going to hurt, but I'm going to cheat. I must end this.

I can see the gate Brian went to! It's almost over.

Then there's this pointless game ending puzzle. Pick the right transporter or get stuck behind an invisible wall. Earlier in the security station there was a note with the correct solution to this puzzle, but I had already forgotten about it, and it's not much of a puzzle in game where you can save at any time.

In the waiting area, we get to something that could be pretty interesting. Each of the six objects here gives a little statement about who they were with at the time of the incident and the player has to figure out whose story doesn't match up.

I zap through the puzzle.

Not because I'm sick of Oaktown! Oaktown has a nasty habit of using flags for things and not clearing them, just like what happened with Yapok-Sundria, the game eventually runs out and things start breaking as flags get overwritten with new ones. The game uses a flag to make sure you talked with each person in the waiting area which is 6/10 flags right there. Needless to say, this segment couldn't be completed without manually clearing some old flags.

Disabling the security system from earlier allows the player to tamper with the security field here and proceed through. There's a passage to the luggage carousel which no doubt will be necessary so I head there immediately.

The goal here is to pick up the purple key to the back of the ticket sales desk, as well as the two cyan keys needed to escape the carousel itself. It's not really a difficult board, but maneuvering on conveyor belts can be annoying.

Alas, there's a bomb on the carousel, which is VERY BAD. In this case it's not Shaun and Brian's fault though, but a bug with ZZT. Something about ZZT's conveyor code and bomb code can cause things to get all jumbled up, resulting in the player being destroyed and ZZT softlocking.

This of course happens to me, and I'm forced to restart Dosbox entirely.

Back outside the player can just move through the crowd and behind the ticket counter. There's one ticket lying out in the open, but it's an old ticket and won't be accepted by the employee at the gate.

There's another bug here with the plane ticket. The employee checks if you have the fake ticket first, then the actual ticket. This means if you pick up the fake ticket at all, you'll always trigger the fake ticket message and have to manually clear the flag to remove it from the player's inventory. It's one last cruel joke for Oaktown to play.

The player catches up with Brian, who boards the plane just before it takes off. There's a nice effect here with the stairs to the plane disappearing and then the visible portion of the plane as well, followed by that tiny dot in the sky that is the airplane flying off to wherever.

Oaktown draws to a close with Brian's escape and some weird explanation of just what powers as a programmer and sentient being in a ZZT world are available to him.

It's an unhappy ending really, and unfortunately the game's sequels aren't uploaded anywhere. On the one hand, I'd love to see what these other episodes are like, but at the same time I am so glad I am done with Oaktown.

Final Thoughts

Oaktown is a failed classic, and it's such a shame. It has so many fun ideas, wonderful graphics for a 1993 ZZT game, and memorable locations. Oaktown goes well beyond Town of ZZT and does a solid job at creating a world that while still very clearly a video game is also grounded in reality enough to feel like an actual place.

But for how much it does right, it all crumbles when you actually sit down and play it. There are simply not enough resources to beat the game without using cheats. The shops are expensive, and what's provided for the player to collect can't stave off the inevitable drain of resources.

The worst part of all this is that quite simply, it's a numbers problem. All of this could be averted by just starting the player off with 1000 health and 500 ammo. It wouldn't be a particularly elegant solution compared to properly balancing the game, but even such a quick and dirty fix would've elevated the game to a much higher level.

There are definitely some other issues that could have been caught in testing, with bugs from flags or the invisible walls blocking off the airport exit. Oaktown feels like its authors went through the same feelings I went through playing it, an exciting start leading to just a slog at the end. I didn't want to keep playing it, and from the "I got bored" comments in the chase sequence, I don't think the authors wanted to keep making it. There's definitely some material here that would've been best left on the cutting room floor.

Oaktown could've served as a learning experience for Brian and Shaun, but with no other released ZZT worlds by them available, it looks like there never was anything to come from the game. If an episode 2 and 3 do actually exist out there somewhere, I wouldn't expect them to play any differently from this first episode. With a few tweaks here and there, and perhaps some scaling back on the end, I feel like Oaktown would be one of those iconic early ZZT games like Aceland, but it winds up leaving such a bad aftertaste that by the time it's over you don't want to go back.