Games made with the BTZ engine

The BTZ engine, short for Better Than Zork, was an ambitious experiment from the mid-1980s, created by Synapse Software after Infocom had made text adventures mainstream. Rather than relying on the rigid verb-noun structure that most players knew—“get lamp,” “open door,” “attack troll”—the engine tried to feel more natural. Its parser was designed with a touch of ELIZA-like conversational logic, so it could respond in ways that felt less mechanical and more like an actual dialogue between the player and the story. The games built with BTZ were marketed as “electronic novels,” an attempt to merge the literary feel of a book with the interactivity of a game.

Games made with the BTZ engine

Most popular Engine: BTZ games

Breakers

Brimstone

Essex

Mindwheel