The player is controlled by the four cursor keys, and the shift key and a cursor key pressed will shoot a bullet (if the player has ammo). The best material from these was released in The Best of ZZT. Fans' letters to him quickly established this, and Sweeney responded by encouraging registered users to make their own worlds and submit them to him. In the newsletters for the registered version of ZZT, it is apparent that Sweeney initially had not expected the editor to become the most popular feature of his game. The worlds are: 'Town of ZZT', 'Caves of ZZT', 'Dungeons of ZZT', and 'City of ZZT'. As the game became obsolete it became freeware, however, with all four worlds of the registered version released for free. With about 30,000 registrations worldwide, ZZT was successful enough to finance the production of Jill of the Jungle.

Three different versions of shareware ZZT were released, with three corresponding registered versions. The shareware versions also included 'Demo of ZZT', which displayed the basic features of ZZT worlds, and 'Tour of ZZT', which allowed the player to view select rooms (some playable) of the four worlds. The level released with the shareware copy is called 'Town of ZZT'. Originally ZZT was shareware, with only one of the four level-sets or 'worlds' released without payment. The language allowed community involvement that extended beyond simply creating level terrain with the built-in editor. Despite the outdated graphics, ZZT become fairly popular because of its integration of an object-oriented scripting language known as ZZT-OOP. Often referred to as ANSI, the character set used in the game is actually IBM/MS-DOS Code page 437, which differs from the most common form of ANSI found today, Windows-1252. ZZT 's graphics used the same style of text-mode graphics that Kingdom of Kroz used 4 years earlier.

It was later jokingly mentioned by Sweeney as being short for Zoo of Zero Tolerance, which has mistakenly become a popular belief. 'ZZT' itself is not an acronym for anything its title was chosen so it would always appear at the bottom of newsgroup listings. ZZT is an ANSI character-based video game, created in 1991 by Tim Sweeney of Potomac Computer Systems which became Epic MegaGames in 1992.

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