Zachtronics leaving game development is such a blow to the industry. Zach is directly and indirectly responsible for a lot of games we see today. His game Infiniminer was a major inspiration for Minecraft, he published a game that was also a book explaining his philosophy on puzzle design, and his games were genuinely fun with no BS.
I dislike the games, since they are too close to work/programming to be fun for me (just like Factorio). However, the success of Zachtronics - both business and creative, is undeniable. I wish they were the ones to gain success with the original 3D cube digging gameplay and not the massively popular Minecraft clone.
I hear this a lot, but I personally don't get it. These games are the best part of my job (the problem solving) without any of the nonsense. Most games today are a grindfest that we convince ourselves is fun because it's happening in a beautiful virtual world.
I view these games similarly. I don't think anything has helped me in my day-to-day decision making at work more than the time I've spent planning and designing my factory(s) in Satisfactory.
Less, but not zero. Personal projects can still suffer from obscure bugs or undocumented behaviour in dependencies, unattainable goals, costs, and other non-bureaucratic frustrations. A significant part of the satisfaction of Factorio for me comes from the knowledge that, if something isn't operating as I expect/hope it to, I can _just look at_ the surface-level representation of the system to diagnose it. This isn't possible in software projects without a huge amount of investment in observability - which is rarely fun or prioritized.
The programming game TIS-100 gives you a view of the internal state of the machine far superior to what exists with most systems. The exception being that Commodore 64 emulator that shows _everything_ going on in memory in real time.
More often (in the embedded world) you are debugging things via JTAG and a serial port (if you are lucky) or a GPIO-driven LED (if you are not lucky or this is super-early in the boot process). And often the JTAG is less than 100% reliable.
I absolutely loved playing TIS-100 despite having no clue what a real world counterpart would be. It was really nice understanding the limitations of the system and then trying to be creative to solve problems. I got through 3/4 of the game before I lost my save (on my GoG version). I just re-bought it on steam for the cloud saves. Same thing happened to my ExaPunks save.
The closest real-world thing would be something like The Connection Machine, which combined 64Ki processors in a hypercube. Individually, they had just a small amount of RAM for programs.
Today's GPUs are more about executing the exact same small program in a massively parallel way, and not individually programming each of the compute elements.
You know... it would be a fun project to make a TIS-100 in actual hardware on an FPGA or something. Actually, if you aren't the FPGA type, you could just write an emulator on an 8-bit microcontroller, and connect them all together. Bonus points for having each one with a display that shows its current execution state.
I remember hearing the same thing about the show Silicon Valley. People in the workplace would say things like "OMG I can't even watch that, it's so like our daily lives!" -- is it? Yes we're coders, but is it?
Zachtronics games give you a limited playing field with a limited set of operations. The fun comes from thinking carefully about small problems, and doing a lot with a little.
Factorio is more like work, because they don't know when to stop. There is just too much going on, too much complexity.
I always wondered how Zach felt about missing what’s arguably the biggest game industry boat of all time: his ideas in Infiniminer being the basis for Minecraft. In the early days the games looked almost identical. But one never became a household name and the other literally the top selling game of all time.
It sounds like he’s found peace with it and had fun and is on to something else. Good for him. That would be hard for me.
Well Western Culture generally gives the most credit to the first person to have an idea, when I personally find the second people (like Persson, also Sergey Brin) to deserve--in these cases--more credit. There's a shortage of second parties to inventions.
> While looking through some project folders, I found an old protype of a game that never quite became anything. Kinda.
> It was called “RubyDung” (for various reasons), and was supposed to be a base building game inspired by Dwarf Fortress
> As the RubyDung engine got more advanced, I started thinking about adding a first person view for following your minions around, kinda like in Dungeon Keeper. It worked ok, but the graphics got very pixellated and distorted, so I left it out.
> But then I found Infiniminer. My god, I realized that that was the game I wanted to do. I played it in multiplayer for a while and had a blast, but found it flawed. Building was fun, but there wasn’t enough variation, and the big red/blue blocks were pretty horrible. I thought a fantasy game in that style would work really really well, so I tried to implement a simple first person engine in that style, reusing some art and code (although not as much as you’d think) from RubyDung, and came up with this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9t3FREAZ-k
Unfortunately, that last YouTube link is not viewable for me ("This video contains content from Nizzotch. It is not available in your country.").
But the conclusion is: Infiniminer was definitely a huge inspiration on Minecraft.
People Make Games made a video about this Infiniminer/Minecraft story and they interviewed Zach Barth. When Microsoft was reviewing the 2.5B Minecraft deal, Zach was working for Microsoft and was on those meetings.
Oh. I remember when Zach presented that to a club we both were in at college (I feel like it was a very early demo). I never linked that directly with Minecraft…
I remember Sauerbraten from before that (released in 2004 according to Wikipedia) and had assumed it was more in the inspiration line.
Wait, so he's not teaching anymore? That was fast. In this interview 2 months ago, he implied that he was shutting down Zachtronics so he could go teach. Maybe I misunderstood.
> “My original plan was to wrap things up at Zachtronics and then find a new job teaching high school computer science, but the timing was off,” he says. “I just finished my first year of teaching and Last Call BBS hasn’t even been released yet! I was hoping that I’d really like teaching and stay with that for a few years, but I learned that’s definitely not the case and I’m having a hard time imagining anything other than games in my future, in some shape or form.”
He said he learned that loving being a teacher was 'not the case'. Perhaps he learned it in the last two months, or was trying to remain positive about the position publicly while reconsidering privately, etc. People change, I don't think there's anything profound to look for just because he changed his public opinion from a few months ago.
High school CS would be awful to teach unless you were at some magnet school or elite private school with enough bright students to fill a classroom. But even then, still awful.
My public highschool CS course was an honors elective taught by the calculus teacher, so I think that made it unattractive as a playground spot. However, I think it was really that the teacher was incredibly patient, kind, and unable to resist tacky puns. I think that helped us students see him more as a teacher than an authority figure to be resisted.
Thats
A) really fucking hard to do, I tried it once*, and I wasn't cut out for it. Teaching takes a special kind of person and a fuckton of effort, and deserves to be paid honestly more than I make as a programmer of computers which at least stick to their syntax rules.
B) the class was small enough that he could put in the individual attention and working-together to make it happen for us.
Unfortunately for the public school system the teacher left a year later.
* I did a boot camp for middle through highschool, and while highschoolers are tough, they were far more willing to work together towards an abstract goal than middle schoolers, for which every day is a bad time for everyone involved.
I can't imagine becoming a teacher right now. My kids are in public schools and the teacher attrition rate is off the charts because the past couple of years have been a horrific experience for many of them. Getting into teaching right now while the pandemic is still lingering and the education administration is a burned out husk is unlikely to go well, though I certainly admire Zach for trying.
During the interview he talks about his experience teaching. I got the impression that a lot of the job of a teacher is having to babysit kids (take away their phones) and that many kids just don't care about the subject being taught.
Thanks for sharing the interview! Check back in on the end of the show, around 2 hours 10 minutes. I asked him if he intended to keep teaching, and he hedged a little bit but essentially said no.
I really loved Shenzhen I/O, it even got me into electronics. I started watching Ben Eater’s series on breadboard computers and built some similar devices to what I was making in the game around a 6502. It’s pretty cool that a game can trigger something like that.
The game had a leaderboard, and at one point an old programmer colleague reached out to me to ask if I was cheating - that’s something I’m still very proud of to this day!
Started playing Shenzhen I/O in 2016 after moving to real Shenzhen, enjoyed it and wrote a guide for the game on Steam,[0] having never designed a PCB in my life. Now own a 1000m² robotics factory with a decent electronics lab and personally push out 3 boards some days. Control boards for a custom four axis system with additional peripherals and three daughterboards today, seven axes system Sunday when machining is completed (we also have a mill and lasers to cut and weld our own metal). [0] https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=78036...
The same thing happened to me! I had just finished the main campaign of Shenzhen I/O and saw Ben Eater’s “Hello World on a Breadboard” video… now I have thousands of dollars in retro electronics, parts, and lab equipment
Before anyone writes a eulogy based on the headline, note the following:
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 me, way more enthusiastically than you would normally expect under these circumstances. “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.”
I play games too infrequently to invest the necessary bandwidth into a Zachtronic game, but I read some of ZACH-LIKE and always respected the philosophy. As long as no one is getting the rug pulled, this sounds like an awesome way to go and an awesome thing for the gaming industry. Hopefully this means more smart indie gems in the future.
Honestly, indie gaming would benefit from a better distinction between the company and the contributor (similar to bands and musicians or films and the director/producer/cinematographer). I know not everyone wants to self-promote, but I would love to see what games certain designers. contributed to before they had an opportunity to lead.
I hope every Zachtronics contributor can get the resources to make their next dream project, and the entire industry becomes a pinch more Zach-like.
This exists to some degree but most of the examples I can think of are specifically about retro games, rather than any and all video games. Lemon64 and LemonAmiga exhaustively document who worked on what in the c64 and Amiga games scenes, for instance. MobyGames does cover modern games but a few checks of modern games sure don't have any credits beyond company. IMDB does cover games but also doesn't delve into any more detail than company.
Note that game credits sequences are sometimes just a list of who works at the company at the time of release, and not an actual reflection of who worked on the game.
This has resulted in a few problems where people get their name stripped off of a game they worked hard on but left the company prior to release etc. Also people may appear on the credits that were in fact in a different department on a different team and never touched the game.
From what I hear this is a problem in the movie industry as well. When you have a huge project that requires the work of hundreds of people spread across multiple years, and possibly multiple sub-contracting specialty companies, there's a lot of cracks for names to fall through.
It definitely seemed like they had done most variations of the idea, and they wanted to try something new. It is interesting that they don't want to try the new things under the Zachtronics names, but it also kinda makes sense, since their fan maybe has certain expectations from that brand? I definitely can relate to how making the same kind of game for 10 year can become tiring. The article also hints that some of them maybe want to try opportunities that has more room for growth than a small indie studio.
Definitely interested to see what they do in the future, the fact that it'll be under a different name doesn't really matter to me.
>It is interesting that they don't want to try the new things under the Zachtronics names, but it also kinda makes sense, since their fan maybe has certain expectations from that brand?
Given that the studio is disbanding, I don't think it would make any sense for any of the former members to continue a new project under the Zachtronics name. They're not just continuing to work together on something else. To quote:
>"We all have different ideas, interests, tolerances for risk, and so on, so we’re still figuring out what we want to do next."
That's how I read it as well. There are lots of electronic music artists that I enjoy that publish different styles of music under different monikers to avoid upsetting the fans of one style of music they produce. More invested fans may decide to check out releases under their other artist name and if it's not for them they know not to follow those releases.
For game developers it's probably more risky with platforms like Steam prominently showing the aggregate user reviews for a particular title. If they decide to go in a different direction they risk alienating their previous customers and giving the release a very negative rating when it could be a hit if it had a new name behind it.
Imagine if FROMSOFT (a renowned developer of tough 3rd person dungeon crawlers) decided to develop a straight chess game; it might be first in class and have absolutely everything a chess enjoyer might want, but I imagine it would be roundly derided if published under the FROMSOFT banner.
I think my favorite line of the article was knowing when to quit is its own kind of skill.
Shuttering my startup last year, I felt this one. I think I quit six months later than I should have. Knowing when to quit is difficult...especially when you think others are depending on you. I applaud this team for leaning into that instinct.
Without knowing what your startup did, non-"As a Service" game studios are an interesting animal in the world of software development because their products have a clear Release Date. To me, this sounds like the developers didn't want to do more cerebral, optimization puzzle boxes, so they decided to close up.
Like someone else mentioned, it's more like a band breaking up because artists no longer want to follow the framework and expectations that they have progressed into.
I absolutely agree, and I think even bands can feel the pressure to keep going if they think people count on it as a livelihood. Making a collective decision to move on is brave no matter the context.
Yes, they have a clear release date. But eg Klei keeps sending out updates and bug fixes and improvements for Oxygen Not Included, and they are well received by the community.
But, of course, if Klei was stopping updates to Oxygen Not Included tomorrow, you could still play the game exactly as it is now, and people could also still make mods.
I think it would be fair to say that money is also a game. You need to play the game to survive in this world, but it's a game and there are many ways to play it.
Depends. If you have a fiduciary money, it has some meaning even when not used in commerce.
Fiduciary money is basically when your note say 'the issuer promises to give the bearer X on request', where X can be a cow or certain amount of gold or some other base currency.
Without commerce, this kind of money essentially degenerates into a voucher. But vouchers have some (minimal) meaning, even without being used in commerce.
Unless they signed bizarrely horrible contracts at least some of the staff will be getting residuals. By way of imperfect comparison, Ringo Starr's annual income of $20m doesn't come from doing the Xmas Special of "Thomas the Tank Engine"
And in the same sense, Zachtronics can cease to exist as a studio, but they can keep around some legal entity that collects the royalties and distributes them to former contributors.
I've found it difficult after starting to work full-time to fully enjoy Zachtronics games, since they use much of the same parts of my brain as my day job, but the sheer joy I got out of Zach's earlier games (SpaceChem, KOHCTPYKTOP, Codex of Alchemical Engineering) contributed a lot to my decision to work in software. I've experienced little else that scratches the "design itch" in such a pure and thoughtful way, whether games from other developers or actual software development.
I've started to feel this way about Factorio... I only can play it if I've felt I've been productive or that I've e.g.: a model training or code compiling in the background.
The reason being that I stop and think: "This is scratching an itch that something _actually_ productive would as well". So whenever I feel like playing Factorio, I pick up a side-project instead if one's been neglected.
Yes, I felt very much the same after my first playthrough. I came back and was suddenly thinking through all these possible solutions to factory management only to realise it felt exactly like programming work and I should probably go and do that instead.
I mostly enjoy my work, and it's nice to feel productive, but the two things are not the same for me. I can be very productive knocking out task after task I don't enjoy, while I can spend a days enjoying the process of chasing down a solutions to a a very minor task with very minor impact.
I like the Zachtronics games not because I feel productive but because I enjoy the nature of the problems they present, and the fact that I can pursue them without any of the headaches or stress that may come with normal work.
TIS-100 brought back some of the same joy that I had when I began with programming many years ago. Since then programming has become boring for me, but the weird limitations of TIS-100 almost made it feel like I was starting fresh again. I loved learning tons of small tricks that I could apply to beat the harder levels.
- the requirements for each piece of work are expressed completely clearly
- you get immediate feedback on whether your solution works
- you are given, without having to build it yourself, accurate metrics for how your solution measures up in terms of costs, speed and so on
- you get to revisit problems as many times you like at your leisure and reoptimize your solutions to make them more elegant or to prioritize different properties
then I definitely envy you. For me, those things being part of the zachtronics experience turn playing the games into a shortcut to the dopamine-producing parts I love about coding.
Revisiting the problems isn't necessary to get the dopamine hit for figuring out a solution, in my opinion, and as for feedback it depends on the company culture.
Honestly it’s not a bad framework to strive for in a workplace. Introduce the ‘zachtronics test’ as a modern version of the old Joel test.
Give your workplace one point for each of the following:
1) you create acceptance tests for features before coding them
2) you have metrics that provide immediate feedback on how a feature performs
3) you have a system for determining the technical challenge level of each feature
4) you allow developers to tackle problems at the level of technical challenge they are comfortable with, so they can develop mastery before moving on to more tricky problems
5) you let people play card games between projects
6) your workplace has a striking and coherent aesthetic, complementary soundtrack and a compelling storyline
I didn't like Zachtronics games, because from reviews I read, I expected them to be like programming, but instead they were merely puzzle games with programming window dressing on them.
Hmm. You might still think that it’s “just” a puzzle game, but did you ever try Ruckingenur II? That one actually got my heart racing the first time I played it.
I find TIS-100 and shenzhen io frustrating because of how limiting they are. There is a max line count per chip and the circuit board is very cramped. I actually finished Exapunks because I felt the language was expressive enough to not be as frustrating and the line limit is a lot higher than needed.
That's why I like them, they have more in common with the thought experiments you see in textbooks. TIS-100 teaches the principles of concurrency by presenting you with a computer architecture small enough to fit onto a single screen.
It helps that there are multiple solutions, and you can try to optimize in a certain area like speed or size.
I feel like the code in those games is merely a convenient interface to the puzzle aspect. It might as easily have been visual programming, and the game would be the same.
Do you believe there's perhaps a kind of student that would be proficient in coding while not showing particular skill (or engagement) in solving those kinds of puzzles?
It's always possible, but the game calmly asks the user to focus, structure a problem in their head and then form a solution.
I wouldn't ask them to finish the game, but watching how they absorb what they're shown and whether they can expand this to new solutions is a fairly easy tell most the time.
Massive kudos to Zachtronics for defining a micro-genre, and crafting such unique, fun, and interesting games with a small team.
I have particularly fond memories of SpaceChem, and subsequent releases always switched things up enough to be fresh and interesting, while also riffing on the same fundamentally satisfying abstract game loop of “solve an algorithm with limited resources, then optimize”.
I loved all of the puzzle Zachtronics games! They're great puzzle games on their own but some also have leaderboards which give you the feeling that you can do better or solve them in different ways.
I'd revisit older games to see which steam friends beat my scores, and then I'd go back through and rediscover, optimize, and get back on top.
>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.
Sums up a lot of indie game developers perfectly. Find a niche, can't escape the niche.
I still have TIS-100 under the Languages skill section of my resume as an Easter Egg. I haven't played many of Zach's recent games, but SpaceChem, Opus Magnum, and TIS-100 were some of the best puzzle games ever made to me.
TIS-100 and Shenzen had that fun little bit of hacking using the docs. Or just fiddling with it and finding that one instruction that had enough of a side effect where it could let you shave off two other instructions. Where you could get that really fun rush of removing 1 cycle from something. It is a skill I do not get to use much anymore as most things are fairly cookie cutter.
As as assembly language enthusiast, TIS-100 is easily my #1 Zachtronics game.
The closet contender would be... CoreWar. Seems like their implementations are rarely updated these days.
Robocode is also cool, but you code in Java instead of assembly, anyway.
I'm still in shock since the initial announcement. These guys are so good at game design, I thought they would be doing it forever. I guess you can't confine very special devs to one thing for most of their career. I hope the teaching thing goes well, but I equally hope Zachtronics makes a return at some point in the future.
> I was hoping that I’d really like teaching and stay with that for a few years, but I learned that’s definitely not the case and I’m having a hard time imagining anything other than games in my future, in some shape or form.
They will likely be doing it forever, they just want to try something else than a small 5-member indie team maybe?
He said he's going to teach high school computer science. As someone who made the same leap, it's cool to hear! He was really awesome about giving his games to teachers to use in their classrooms for free.
He tried teaching for a year but sounds like he isn't going to stick with it.
“I just finished my first year of teaching and Last Call BBS hasn’t even been released yet! I was hoping that I’d really like teaching and stay with that for a few years, but I learned that’s definitely not the case and I’m having a hard time imagining anything other than games in my future, in some shape or form.”
For anyone who hasn't read Matthew Burns's short fiction, it's as much of a treat as his writing for Eliza. I think he used to have more work online, but he's still got some short stories and interactive stuff here... https://matthewseiji.com
Full disclosure, I'm an old friend and glad to see him mentioned. I'm lucky enough to be reading an early draft of a novel he's been working on as we speak.
Although it was never promised, I enjoyed Eliza and was hopeful of another visual novel through Zachtronics + Burns. Hopefully something in a similar spirit comes out in the future.
Wow, I just downloaded Eliza and man, it's like it was written specifically for me. So many parallels to my own life and interests, it's actually weird. I'd like to have a beer with that guy. I'll have to check out his other stuff.
That's awesome. Eliza touched me on a lot of levels as well.
In fact, Matt and I used to play with the original Eliza (the therapist) together in second grade on a Mac SE, between rounds of "The Manhole" and "Glider" and trying to write our own game in Hypercard. So I'm, uh, more than slightly biased hahah. But even just explaining the premise of Eliza in a sentence or two seems to make people do a double take and a Keanu style "Whoa." It didn't even dawn on me until later how much the voice acting and production also really pays off. The game immerses you in spite of the minimalism / simplicity, the way staring at a good painting does. I think it's truly a work of art, or an attempt to break through the noise and say something about the human condition. At first blush the concept is just vicious, and pitch perfect at exploiting the zone between getting you to play along and making you feel deeply uncomfortable. And then you get drawn into the deep disillusionment with corporate culture and it's a free ride on your neurons for the game designers. It's a hell of a statement, presented immaculately.
I passed your comment along.
Incidentally my first "true indie" game was SpaceChem. I'm tempted to play it again, maybe try and beat it this time. It's a very fun game, and cheap too, if you want to play along.
Glad they got to go out on their own terms. They're such a niche game studio that I was really worried that they closing their doors because of market apathy or dissatisfaction with the status quo. This is a good ending.
Spacechem singlehandedly got me back into gaming 10 years ago. It was such a wonderful example of how a simple concept worked to its extreme could be more delightful and entertaining than shiny AAA games.
I don't want to be tinfoil about this, but I suspect there is maybe some more corporate politic stuff happening here than Zach lets on (and rightfully so). Zachtronics is wholly owned by Alliance Media Holdings. Alliance is run primarily by two people Jay Gelman (CEO) and Nathan Gelman (Director of Publishing + Stuido Operations). Last year, Nathan Gelman expressed some real crazy zionist opinions on Twitter during the most recent wave of the Israel-Palestine conflict. I didn't screenshot it, but you can sort of see some of the wake of it by searching his account name on twitter and seeing the replies to the now deleted tweet:
Nathan also pretty consistently likes orthodox jewish content on Twitter, which, to be clear, isn't bad on its own, but with that plus the deleted tweet during the latest I-P conflict, thing I think it's maybe safe to say that Nathan, likely Zach's direct report as he is the "Director of Publishing and Studio Operations", has got some STRONG political beliefs. What I SUSPECT is that Zach probably just got tired of dealing with that and, given the ownership structure, has to "end" Zachtronics to step away from them.
It's tenuous evidence and maybe doesn't mean anything, but the only other point that makes me think Alliance is a not-great-company to be under, is that on the episode of Eggplant show where they interview Bravery Network Online creators (other studio/game Alliance published), The BNO people said that "the legal issues that came up on the game were some of the worst things our lawyer said they ever encountered". (Don't have the exact timestamp but here's the episode)
It seems like one possibility. Reading between the lines of the comments about different risk tolerances and so on, another possibility is that the team reached an impasse in trying to agree what their next game project or projects should be.
"I was hoping that I’d really like teaching and stay with that for a few years, but I learned that’s definitely not the case and I’m having a hard time imagining anything other than games in my future, in some shape or form."
He sold Zachtronics a few years ago so I wonder if he is free to start a new game company.
“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.”
So they basically got tired of making more Zachlikes, which is more than understandable at this point. Amazing games, but I think they can safely say their job is done after they've basically kickstarted a genre. Rather than being sad seeing Zachtronics go, I'm sort of anticipating to hear more about some of those smaller "weird" projects Zach alludes to in the article. Would be much more tragic to see a designer of that caliber left feeling stuck making games in a similar vein for longer than they feel is necessary.
Ten years is long enough to inspire the next generation to make zach-like games.
Games like Signal State or Turing Complete.
But it's a sad goodbye to Zachtronics. They have a certain style of layering story to take you out of the raw mechanics which most their rivals don't. I think Shenzhen I/O was their peak but TIS100 is also a must-play and I certainly enjoyed most their other games.
I think Zach has a certain level of finesse and polish that is hard to find elsewhere. The further you look into the details, the more impressed you get.
For instance, just browse through some of the datasheets of Shenzhen I/O. It mimics reality all too well (mistakes in datasheets, chinese-only text, various fonts and layouts, handwritten notes, etc.).
I've yet to find a Zachlike outside of Zachtronics proper that didn't feel like a knockoff rather than a true peer. Signal State was probably the closest aesthetically, but didn't capture at all the optimization puzzle that makes a Zachlike so addictive. Not to mention that it was simply far too easy.
The rest that I've seen weren't even in the same ballpark of polish. Maybe in a world where we only got the Codex of Alchemical Engineering, they would seem more up to scratch. But we've had Opus Magnum and Exapunks.
Factorio most successfully scratched the same itch as the Zachlikes for me. There’s Human Resource Machine and 7 Billion Humans, which have a similar puzzle format with online histograms. Prime Mover comes to mind too, but the learning curve was steep.
I love their games (i think TIS-100 and Infinifactory are my favorites) and i hope someone will do the minimal amount of maintenance so they will keep working.
Spacechem is one of my favorite game ever, and I have purchased nearly every Zachtronics game since. Thanks Zach & team, looking forward to wherever you have next for us!
Zachtronics' games have given me so much joy over the years, very sad to hear this. My favourite of the bunch is probably EXAPUNKS, but Shenzhen I/O is also wonderful. I was also surprisingly taken by Eliza, given how different it is from the rest. Thank you Zach!
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