The entries for the Summer 2001 24 hours of ZZT contest are no available for download. Due to problems with Tripod, the file is now hosted on Viovis' page and you can grab it here. Stay tuned for the results, which may be announced by the end of this week. Visit the official 24hoz page here.

Wayward's Nameless Awards are back and will cover many award categories for the first half of 2001. The awards are kind of a hybrid of the IF Annual ZZT Excellence Awards and The Hoodian Awards, with both community-based and judges-based voting. The judges are Fishfood, me (Hercules), Knightt, Ringworm, Tseng and Zenith. For detailed information on the categories, scoring system and more, go here.

The Summer 2001 24 hours of ZZT, hosted by Theta14 and zzblue, is now over. It ended yesterday, June 23, on 7:00 PM EST and the topic was "invention". All entries have been received, but they haven't been uploaded yet. The judging process will probably start soon and all we can do is wait for the entries and results to be released. In the meantime, visit the 24hoz page here.

Akwende has postponed the MegaZeux Graphics Competition 2001, due to the few people who signed up. It not sure when it will be held now, but probably in the near future. Go here to sign up and get more information.

Lemmer, creator of ZZT Romp and Wacky World History, has joined Viovis' company Eaglerock Interactive. He has already released a game, which is a weird rendition of "#darkdigital, the Sim 3" (by Jawatrader) called "The Misadventures of Lemmer the Dead More Lemmer". You can visit the ERI page here.

Akwende is hosting the MZX Graphics Competition 2001 during the weekend of June 23-24. It works like this: the contestants will be given a generic MZX board and they have to improve the graphics as much as they can (they have two days to do this). There are a few rules, of course -- the competition is for individuals only (so no teams), no external files can be used (you can change the chars and colors of the MZX file, but you can't use external .CHR and .PAL files) and you cannot use any pre-made graphics. The board will be posted on Friday June 22, 8-9 PM EST and they have until Sunday June 24 (8-9 PM EST) to finish their entry. Entries will be judged on overall quality, originality, use of char set & palette, active graphics and style/theme. You can sign up by sending an e-mail to Akwende and submissions should go to this address as well. The page for this contest can be found here.

There have recently been changes in both Knightt's company Random Inc and Ringworm's company Lame Game. NMZmaster has joined Random Inc and he is working on Chrono Wars 14 together with Chronos and Avirox. craNKGod has temporarily left Random Inc, but he may be back in the near future. As for Lame Game, they have had another big blow after the departures of Zenith (Random Inc, then Eaglerock Interactive), Viovis (Eaglerock Interactive) and Jojoisjo (Interactive Fantasies); StarDreamer (maintainer and designer of Lame Game's website) has left. According to himself, he left on good terms and he will still be in the community, but he'll be solo from now on. It's unknown what is going to happen with Lame Game now.

Terryn is hosting the Summer Day of Zeux, which we knew for quite a while. However, the page is finally up now - visit it here. You may wonder what "Duelstream" means, though. It means two topics will be given at the start of the contest (one being a broad one, like "fear" and one being a specific one, like "make a game about rednecks hunting deer") and you'll have to create an entry based on ONE of these topics. So basically, you have two options, instead of one. The contest will be held on July 6, 2001 5:00 PM (GMT) to July 7,2001 5:00 PM (GMT) and contestants are expected to sign up before the contest starts. The topics will be announced on #mzx (Espernet, IRC), the DigitalMZX message boards and the Summer (Ds)DoZ page. The latter contains all detailed information on the contest, like the scoring system and the sign-up form.

Akwende has released the first official release of his MegaZeux update MZXak and the accompanying MZXrun. MZXak requires the files that come with other version of MZX (the sound files, etc). It uses 4 color chars and several other new programming features. Of course, there's a help file which explains it all. MZXrun is the MegaZeux executable, but without the editor so that it takes it up a lot less memory. This is good, seeing as many people have memory problems with MegaZeux. Akwende has also announced that this is by no means the final version of MZXak -- it still has some bugs and people are having a few technical problems with it, too. The first official MegaZeux release that uses MZXak is "Tetris", released under the IF banner. Download MZXak & MZXrun here and Tetris here.

Yesterday was a memorable day for Interactive Fantasies, the ZZT/MegaZeux company I (Hercules) am president of. We celebrated our 5th anniversary! On June 2nd 1996, I founded the small real-life based company Inferno Soft, which was later on (summer 1997) renamed into Interactive Fantasies, just before we went online in October 1997. Yesterday we held a small birthday party on IRC (#if, Austnet) with a few IF members and fans. Issue 11 of our company magazine iFantasy (being worked on by fejjy) will contain a special birthday section with submissions from the IF members.

Dsone is hosting the second Akim Productions Comedy 24 hours of ZZT. It will be held somewhere in late July or early August -- a date hasn't been set yet. The judges are Dsone, D. and Knightt. To sign up, e-mail D. or Dsone. For more information, go here and click on "24hozzt comedy NEW" in the navigation bar.