Mark Brown from Game Maker’s Toolkit released a new video.

The same way you might play Dragon Quest and rush to assemble a tribute in RPG Maker, players have been making their own old-school adventures in ZQuest for decades. The results range from the quaint to the damn near authentic, and the cream of the crop is collected on a database-slash-forum called PureZC. It’s a visually lean, community-driven treasure trove the likes of which I didn’t think existed on the internet anymore. Custom games, all of which are called “quests” and disseminated as.qst files to be plugged into ZQuest, are split up into a few genres: Metroidvania, NES-style, dungeon romper, randomizer, and so on.

Like Venezia and Clark said, you can go a long way without writing so much as a line of code (though the option is there, should you opt to push the engine beyond its normal scope using the ZScript language). A fan favorite metroidvania quest from 2024, The Deep, features puzzles that incorporate shadows and fog, conveyor belts, a hookshot like you might remember from A Link to the Past, and all sorts of other novelties.

It’s easy to see how it took home the gold in a community contest, but all the more intriguing when you learn it did so in a “non-scripted bracket” and was built in just over three weeks. Bigger, multi-year endeavors like Lost Isle and The Hero of Dreams are lengthy and fully-featured games in their own right—projects that, if you squint, look and feel remarkably like unreleased Game Boy Advance games. While the quests are diverse, numbering over a thousand, reverence for the 40-year-old Nintendo series is the one thing that makes it all cohere.

Recently, Michael Hall, a doctoral candidate in the Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies Program, was invited to present his work exploring representation in gaming, “Dawnbreaker, the Curious Case of Decolonialism and Colonialism in Final Fantasy XIV, Dawntrail,” at the Popular Culture Association National Conference.

This new expansion for Final Fantasy XIV takes place in what is very clearly the Americas. While the story decenters on the individual, putting more focus on community and tradition, it also puts conquistador armor in the Native American expansion.

“Gaming has an issue with representation of non-Western cultures, and it’s good to point that out through a critical lens,” Hall said. “Representation can be done, both poorly and well.”

Following reports of recurring DRM checks, Sony clarifies that digital games only require a single online verification to confirm ownership in a new statement.