85% off and $1.49 USD right now for the summer sale

In case anyone's curious I recommend the podcast episode with Zach Barth on the Draknek and Friends podcast to hear where he's at now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLrh8wcBy8I

Happy to hear that he's continuing developing games and we can expect more to come!

I'd play it.

i loved playing ShenzhenIO! So much so that i ended up buying and registering the domain of the fictitious company you were hired by in the game. That domain redirects to Seam now

Without specifically looking into it but just going off of Steam releases and headline, I'd assumed Zachtronics closing was Zach Barth leaving the scene, and the company that made Kaizen etc were some of his former colleagues continuing on without him.

But apparently the Kaizen-making company is still Zach Barth?

So what was Zachtronics closing then? Him changing his mind and coming back a year later? Why throw away the brand? As cringingly shallow as that sentence was to type, a new "Zachtronics" game was a reflexive auto-buy for many people.

"Eliza" is a bit unusual for Zachtronics as it's not a programming/puzzle game but a visual novel. But it's excellent and I think it's one of their most under-appreciated games. It's well-written, well-acted, and very prescient. Highly recommended!

> capturing the essence of what makes programming fun and put them into a game.

They definitely straddle there line between "those is a fun video game" and "it looks too much like my job" for people in the industry, but there's a whole genre of workplace simulators for doing other people's jobs vicariously. A semi truck driver would see playing a semi truck simulator in the same way, but American Truck Simulator is quite popular. Anyway, play Zachatronics games if you find them fun, but if you don't, then, uh, don't feel bad about not playing them.

for anyone on the fence about these games: I'll highly recommend Opus Magnum as the starting point. It's a good intro-to-Zachtronics game because every problem can be brute forced if desired - in many of the others, you need to make some clever arrangements and logical leaps to progress, due to very limited playing field sizes.

they are quite unique and very well-made though. if you like sequence-puzzle games but are getting tired of the endless flood of Sokoban-flavored things, give it a try!

> So what was Zachtronics closing then? Him changing his mind and coming back a year later? Why throw away the brand? As cringingly shallow as that sentence was to type, a new "Zachtronics" game was a reflexive auto-buy for many people.

It's not clear that this happened here, but I could imagine that someone successful enough not to need the money might literally prefer to have their work evaluated on its own merits and not have the outsized level of attention that being well-known brings. I remember reading in Eric Clapton's autobiography (which might or might not be an accurate retelling of course) that the original plan for Derek and the Dominoes was to name them "Del and the Dominoes" and basically hide the fact that he was the guitarist since he was tired of all of the attention. According to him, "Derek" was a slip of the tongue from someone on stage one night, and the record label eventually decided to try to capitalize on his hype by marketing the fact that he was behind it.

I'm good friends with the writer of Eliza. If you enjoyed it, you might like his novel.

https://matthewseiji.com/process

I think about this game often

Too true. I used to absolutely love Zachtronics games. Then I became a professional programmer and I just can’t play the programming themed ones anymore. Kind of a shame because TIS-100 is what made me want to be a programmer in the first place.

Here is something I (Zach) wrote up a while ago in an attempt to explain it:

> Back in 2016, we sold Zachtronics to a company called Alliance, who we worked for as employees and made all the Zachtronics games from SHENZHEN I/O onward. In 2022 we stopped working for them and started a new studio called Coincidence, which we own and run as a sort of co-op that allows us to work on projects together, or not together, or anything in-between. (By "we" I mean the five of us who made all the Zachtronics games from SHENZHEN I/O onward; the team was much more dynamic before that, as described in the first few pages of ZACH-LIKE.)

> I still work for Alliance and maintain the Zachtronics games, but we don't own any of that IP, so anything new we make is going to be attached to the new studio and the new name.

(I did spend a year teaching computer science at a public high school, but that overlapped the last year of Zachtronics, rather than being between Zachtronics and Coincidence like it's often reported.)

At Coincidence, we have released two puzzle games so far, Kaizen: A Factory Story and U.V.S. Nirmana, and have more (four?) in the works. I'm hoping that I'll get to work on some less-obviously-in-the-genre games soon, but I haven't git initted anything yet so I guess it's too early to say.

Zachtronics wrapped up because they all got a bit burned out by the yearly release pace, and Zach tried to become a teacher. He didn’t like it, and when the rest of the team continued making games, he joined up with them and thus Coincidence. Further down the discussion I shared a podcast where he tells the story.

Maybe he sold his company, or never completely owned the name himself?

What's up with the AI narration at the beginning? Or is it just someone with an incredibly steady voice and AI cadence? It's uncanny and weird considering that this is a podcast hosted by actual humans!

Yes, as I recall, he sold Zachtronics to investors sometime after TIS-100 so that he could focus on making the games and have someone else worry about the business.

I understand why he might not want to and hope I would have the character to do similarly in his place, but they should really lead with "by Zach Barth" rather than "from the original Zachtronics team", which still sounds great, but tbh at least for me bumped it from "buy and play immediately" to "wishlist".

Any chance of making it onto GOG? I prefer to pickup games from there whenever I can.

Hi Zach, Fortune’s Foundation is my favorite game ever. Thank you!

It's unlikely. We do have a DRM-free version of Kaizen on itch.io, which also includes a Steam key so that you can enjoy the best of both worlds:

https://astralogicalgames.itch.io/kaizen-a-factory-story

Thanks! I still play it often, which is not true of any of my other games.