Goodbye Zachtronics, Developers of Very Cool Video Games (kotaku.com) 18
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Kotaku: On July 5, Zachtronics will be releasing Last Call BBS, a collection of stylish little puzzle games wrapped up in a retro PC gaming vibe. After 11 years in business (and even longer outside of commercial releases), a time which has seen the studio develop a cult following almost unrivaled in indie gaming, it will be the last new game Zachtronics will ever release. We spoke to founder Zach Barth to find out why.
Named for founder Zach Barth, Zachtronics has spent most of those 11 years specializing in puzzle games (or variations on the theme). And pretty much every single one of them has been great (or at least interesting). [...] The result has been a succession of games that may not have been to everyone's tastes, but for those with whom they resonated, it was their shit. It's not hard seeing why: most of Zachtronics' games involved challenging puzzles, but also a deeply cool and interesting presentation surrounding them, such as the grimy hacker aesthetic of Exapunks, or the Advance Wars-like Mobius Front 83. Given those initial and superficial differences, it can sometimes be hard pinpointing exactly what makes a game so clearly a Zachtronics joint, but like love and art, when you see it you just know it.
So it's sad, but also awesome in its own way, that 2022 will see the end of Zachtronics. Not because their publisher shuttered them, or because their venture capital funding ran out, or because Activision made them work on Call of Duty, or any other number of reasons (bankruptcy! scandal!) game developers usually close their doors. No, Zachtronics is closing because...they want to. "We're wrapping things up!" Barth tells Kotaku's Luke Plunkett. "Zachtronics will release Last Call BBS next month. We're also working on a long-awaited solitaire collection that we're hoping to have out by the end of the year. After that, the team will disband. We all have different ideas, interests, tolerances for risk, and so on, so we're still figuring out what we want to do next."
"We felt it was time for a change. This might sound weird, but while we got very good at making 'Zachtronics games' over the last twelve years, it was hard for us to make anything else. We were fortunate enough to carve out a special niche, and I'm thankful that we've been able to occupy it and survive in it, but it also kept us locked into doing something we didn't feel like doing forever."
Last Call BBS will be released on July 5 on Steam. You can view the trailer here.
Named for founder Zach Barth, Zachtronics has spent most of those 11 years specializing in puzzle games (or variations on the theme). And pretty much every single one of them has been great (or at least interesting). [...] The result has been a succession of games that may not have been to everyone's tastes, but for those with whom they resonated, it was their shit. It's not hard seeing why: most of Zachtronics' games involved challenging puzzles, but also a deeply cool and interesting presentation surrounding them, such as the grimy hacker aesthetic of Exapunks, or the Advance Wars-like Mobius Front 83. Given those initial and superficial differences, it can sometimes be hard pinpointing exactly what makes a game so clearly a Zachtronics joint, but like love and art, when you see it you just know it.
So it's sad, but also awesome in its own way, that 2022 will see the end of Zachtronics. Not because their publisher shuttered them, or because their venture capital funding ran out, or because Activision made them work on Call of Duty, or any other number of reasons (bankruptcy! scandal!) game developers usually close their doors. No, Zachtronics is closing because...they want to. "We're wrapping things up!" Barth tells Kotaku's Luke Plunkett. "Zachtronics will release Last Call BBS next month. We're also working on a long-awaited solitaire collection that we're hoping to have out by the end of the year. After that, the team will disband. We all have different ideas, interests, tolerances for risk, and so on, so we're still figuring out what we want to do next."
"We felt it was time for a change. This might sound weird, but while we got very good at making 'Zachtronics games' over the last twelve years, it was hard for us to make anything else. We were fortunate enough to carve out a special niche, and I'm thankful that we've been able to occupy it and survive in it, but it also kept us locked into doing something we didn't feel like doing forever."
Last Call BBS will be released on July 5 on Steam. You can view the trailer here.
what a shame! (Score:1)
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Yes, I hope they will be able to somehow keep them updated so they continue to work. Especially MacOS tends to require constant care, with Apple constantly obsoleting things and changing architectures. We've already lost a bunch of great games in the 64-bit transition (things like Portal 1 and 2, all episodes of Half Life), and I imagine the forced ARM-only transition is only a couple of years away.
SpaceChem has already been unplayable for a while until Zachtronics fortunately updated it, I would hate to se
Translation (Score:4, Funny)
Translation: "We got rich, now we're going to enjoy life and spend some of that money."
Go them! :-)
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Probably for the better, before they get bought up by EA and forced to squeeze out mediocre sequels, then get thrown onto the heap where Bullfrog, Maxis and Westwood are already rotting away.
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List of Zachtronics' games on Steam (Score:3)
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Looking down that list I had to think of this scene [youtube.com].
Will be missed (Score:2)
They make some really innovative single player games that are part programming, part puzzle, and always simple enough to be reasoned through. Games like SpaceChem teach multi-threaded programming without actually doing multi-threaded programming - instead, you're handling things running in loops to attach atoms to in various ways, which is really abstracting how you pass data between threads, and the tricky bit of synchronizing between them all.
Others like TIS-100 do it more explicitly, except you have to g
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Just to avoid the whole "google the walkthrough" scenario because you got stuck at one spot and cannot proceed where someone just dumps the solution on the lap, you score 3 stars and learn absolutely nothing.
almost all of these games have the same pattern: if you find a valid solution it will score in three different broad ranks: space efficiency, time efficiency and resource efficiency (every game gives those categories subtle different meanings) compared to current results of the whole community. you even get a distribution graph on how the community performs (in general, and vs you). that's a very good system imo. you can just move on to the next puzzle, or that information can motivate you to try and beat
Grateful for this post (Score:2)
Legitimately never heard the name, "Zachtronics," before, but had one or two of their games on my Steam wishlist (so I'd get a notification when it was on sale, latest was, "Mobius Front '83," and many of the other games seem right up my alley. Probably would never had looked into the others that I just bought (and seem like I will greatly enjoy) without this post. So, for once, a Slashdot article not only was interesting, but was really useful for me.
Maybe I should quit while I'm ahead?
Re: Grateful for this post (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)