This sentence sounds strangely poetic. Can we write a song with that line?
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I am still working on that… who leaked it?
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Congratulations, I was stuck at the statue, too 
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:shaving_accident:
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That’s what I thought too. 
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My Zak McKracken Story…
It isn’t anything special, but… that’s it.
I discovered Zak with a schoolmate of mine. We used to play it in his basement, where he had a 8088 PC. We spent many afternoons on the game, being fascinated by the vastness of what seemed to us a real open world. The game was very difficult, and we didn’t finish it. Then we grew up, and we lost one another. It’s life.
We got in touch almost by chance two years ago. I discovered he, after travelling all around the world for years, settled in Paris, France. I immediately thought about those afternoons spent playing. I didn’t say anything. One day he was in my hometown and we met for a drink. The first thing he said me was: “do you remember those afternoons spent playing Zak McKracken in my basement”?
We are now friend again. Every time he comes to Italy, we meet. I’ve been in Paris for his wedding. We’ll play Zak together again, some day. And we’ll finish it, this time.
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@David
my Zak origin story
WARNING: this contains spoilers!! Even for those who have finished the game!
First off, I hold Zak responsible for :
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my poor grasp of English. “See ya” turned out to be “not proper English” according to my English teacher
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me finding out about the existence of the Kickstarter for TWP. No less than @David himself posted about it on a Zak fanpage on Facebook. The rest is history and a more than 3 year long fantastic journey.
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me making new friends to enjoy old games with, including the famous Zak McKracken replay, which despite most topics going off-topic here stayed mainly on-topic for over 1200 posts!
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bringing me the pleasure to replay Zak while at the same time giving hints and passing my knowledge of the game to a whole new generation of players
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me wasting hours daily for several weeks trying to break the game with @tasse-tee and recording funny videos to share. I have compiled a few Youtube playlists of them here:
(Please read the disclaimer below before watching any of the videos)
*** DISCLAIMER: MY VIDEOS MAY CONTAIN FRUITLESS EXPERIMENTS LEADING TO STANDARD RESPONSES FROM ZAK (AND OTHER CHARACTERS) INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO “That doesn’t seem to work” OR EVEN DEAD STARES. MY VIDEOS MAY CONTAIN PLAYING ACTIONS THAT ARE INTENTIONALLY EXECUTED TO BE A JOKE. NO GUARANTEES ARE GIVEN THAT YOU WILL GET SAID JOKES NEITHER ON YOUR LEVEL OF APPRECIATION.***
Sushi Endings and near-death experiences
Funny stuff (Zak the magician, Angry Annie taking it out on Zak, Al Caponian Experiments, bugs,…)
[note: I still need to sort out a bit of that last one…]
Ok, now off to my story… It all started 30 years ago. My older brother had bought a Commodore 128 and we read about Zak McKracken in a review of the game in Zzap!, a legendary C64 magazine. We had already played a bit of Maniac Mansion in a “fully unlocked demo” version (sorry), so we were thrilled to find out there was this cool follow-up coming.
I still remember the day our dad took us to a computer store 10 miles further, the only place you could actually buy C64 games and we got Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders!
My brother and I played this game for hours on end, amazed at all the locations that were in this game. The review in the magazine had only shown some screens in San Francisco. So it really felt that the whole world (and beyond!) fitted on these two floppy disks.
It was our favorite game: my brother made his own Zak McKracken T-shirt, got noseglasses - the smell of the rubber nose I can still recall with fondness to this day.
We mostly played the game together. Entering the exit codes was one of the things that went faster if one looked up the visa code while the other brother (us, not the Caponians) drove the cursor with the joystick around. One of the symbols would resemble the flag of the Netherlands or France or a dot. Working together was also less error prone. Although it pays off to enter the wrong code five times! By then, we decided this was the best game. Ever.
Talking about the slow joystick controls, we quickly discovered a trick to compensate for the slow joystick controls: hit the spacebar to pause the game, put the cursor where you need it, hit space again to unpause, click the button, pause again, move the cursor and so on. This helped to escape from the Aliens a couple of times! A trick we also applied to outrun Edna in Maniac Mansion.
We had part one of the solution from a magazine, but we generally tried to avoid looking at it. Until the point we figured out we were way past that point. That helped us realise there’s often more than one solution to a puzzle, which to this day is very enjoyable.
As we had agreed to not advance in the game without the other, one of the things I did was playing over and over again from the very start by myself, just to see if I discovered some new things or objects. Then I’d tell my brother about it and we’d look at it together, thinking how to use it or how to solve a puzzle.
Until the point we finally got a big part of the machine together and we figured out how to enter the sphinx… and the game gave a “disk load error - please retry”. Of course we did not make a backup copy of the disks as instructed in the manual. After all, our English wasn’t that good and we played Zak with a dictionary at hand.
It was only a few years later we got hold of a copy of a friend of friend of a friend… and we finally got to finish Zak. My brother sold his Commodore shortly after, with all his games, but I made sure I held on to Zak McKracken!
Fast forward 25 years: I replayed Zak McKracken in both the C64 and (for the first time) FM-towns version with a few people on the TWP forum who never heard about it before. Finally I found some people to show and talk about Zak. And they’re just as crazy about it as I am, motivating me to discover new things or funny things or just to break the game. And boy, did we find some new ways!
And still I discovered new things in the game and small easter eggs, replies I didn’t know were in the game.
Or I just forgot about them thanks to the 60Hz hum.
Next up is translating the game so I can also pass it on to my children. Or just give them a dictionary. 
Thanks @David & Matthew (and all the rest) for creating the game!
Special thanks to my brother for buying the game and playing it with me back then and to @tasse-tee for playing it and sharing experiences in the present day (the videos above being just a part of the results)
Party like it’s 1997! 
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Owww?
eagerly watches videos
oh well, at least they were short.
Don’t tell me you already knew and tried ALL of that !? 
Hope you can make it! I’m actually giving two different speeches. On Friday afternoon, one about Lucasfilm Games during the 1980s, focusing on graphic adventures I worked on.
On Saturday, one specifically on Zak. That’s where I plan to use parts of your stories about playing the game. That’s also when Daniele’s movie will be premiered.
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It´s not about trying. If you submit EVERYTHING you did even if it didn´t produce any results (as is the case with at least two thirds of those videos) I feel a bit tricked after a while. Some of those video titles seemed a bit click-baity to me, but at least you had your fun I guess? 
it’s 3:30 AM for crying out loud…!
That’s why I just gave up and I put a note next to it that I still had to weed it out…
later.
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Alright so it wasn´t intentional. I was just confused why you made so much effort in uploading and naming videos that aren´t all that interesting.
I love your story! Such a missed opportunity to not include a scratch-and-sniff pack-in for the game. So many options:
- Stale French bread
- Shushi’s water bowl
- Inside the squirrel’s cave
- Yak fur and …
feel free to add to this list.
And yes, it is possible to meet up in Rome. We’re not there for long, 26–28 September. Then briefly on 1 October as we make our way back from Naples to stay near the Rome airport. Is there anyone else from this forum who’d like to join you?
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Exactly! I feel the same way.
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Great story! How old were you and your brother when you first played Zak?
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And your teacher has no imagination! “See ya” may not be grammatically correct, but any English speaker would know what you meant 
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I played Zak as a kid probably around 1989 on our C64. My older brother and I loved Maniac Mansion and even my mom didn’t seem to mind it as much as the other video games we played. So she bought us Zak McKracken and we were so excited to have another LF game.
We got stuck a lot, but it was fun to try a bunch of things, and then come back to it the next day after thinking of a bunch of ideas.
My brother has since passed away, but re-playing Zak now brings back some really great memories of playing as kids and discovering it together.
Fast-forward and I get to share the experience with my son who was totally into playing Zak with me (and also loves TWP).
It’s been a real treat that TWP opened these doors for us.
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