Zombo.com in VR

January 18, 2020 9:50 AM

Anything is possible. The only limit is yourself. Terry Cavanagh, the game designer behind VVVVVV, Super Hexagon, and Dicey Dungeons, finally found a match for virtual reality’s infinite potential, pairing it with one of the oldweb’s greatest single-serving sites.

It was prototyped in LÖVR, an “open source framework for rapidly building immersive 3D experience.” The Zombo.com VR source is available, made in less than 60 lines of Lua.

The death of Flash means the original Zombo.com no longer plays on most browsers, but a fan created an HTML5 version if you’d like to relive the heady days of 1999.

posted by waxpancake (17 comments total)

...a fan, and mefite!
posted by churl at 9:55 AM on January 18, 2020 [1 favorite]

Well, I guess that our work here is done!
posted by Meatbomb at 9:56 AM on January 18, 2020 [3 favorites]

WELCOME
posted by cortex at 9:56 AM on January 18, 2020 [1 favorite]

Looked at my history and I’m averaging one front-page post every five years. Hope that one was worth it. See you in 2025!
posted by waxpancake at 10:02 AM on January 18, 2020 [21 favorites]

Cavanagh also recently open sourced the VVVVVV code which means it can be improved. A lot of people have had a chuckle about a 318-case switch block. Cavanagh's twitter response was, "Every screenshot I see posted of terrible things in the VVVVVV source code only makes me more powerful".
posted by fleacircus at 10:13 AM on January 18, 2020 [8 favorites]

VR is good now
posted by Going To Maine at 10:15 AM on January 18, 2020

fleacircus, thank you for that, the improved veni vidi vici is really... something.
posted by KTamas at 10:17 AM on January 18, 2020

This is what VR was created for, this is the kind of stupid I need and want on the web.

Best of.
posted by Fizz at 10:46 AM on January 18, 2020 [1 favorite]

Holding out for VR Hamster Dance.
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 10:50 AM on January 18, 2020 [2 favorites]

Fuck. I had just accomplished everything I wanted to do on the old Zombo.com.

The only limit was me.
posted by Slarty Bartfast at 10:54 AM on January 18, 2020 [13 favorites]

It's "hampster," so soon we forget!
posted by rhizome at 11:12 AM on January 18, 2020 [6 favorites]

Time to get headset, VR has finally found the question that it answers.
posted by rodlymight at 11:41 AM on January 18, 2020

Huh. Maybe 2020 isn't going to be so bad after all.
posted by schmod at 2:58 PM on January 18, 2020

Wow, that switch statement. He didn't even name his states? What kind of a brain can work that way?
posted by rhamphorhynchus at 3:27 PM on January 18, 2020

It's "hampster," so soon we forget!

Damned autocorrect!!!

*shakes fist at kids these days*

Why, in my day, we had to misspell things the hard way, with laziness or carelessness or bad spelling or irony.
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 3:39 PM on January 18, 2020

> See you in 2025!

Not likely. Now that humanity has nothing left to strive for, the spiral into extinction will just spin that much faster.
posted by davelog at 5:44 AM on January 19, 2020

Back in '99/2000 I babysat a friends 8 mo old boy. The poor tyke had colic or some such and was hard to get to sleep. Zombo.com put that kid out in no time.
posted by james33 at 5:38 AM on January 20, 2020 [2 favorites]