For those who don't know -- while Zachtronics is no longer making games, Zach Barth is still active now under the company Coincidence Games. They just game out with a spacecraft engineering puzzle game:
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.
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.
> 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.
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!
This is one of my all time favorite games. It and Shenzhen I/O do a wonderful job of capturing the essence of what makes programming fun and put them into a game.
My biggest surprise from playing EXAPUNKS is how futile it is to try and pre-optimize a solution. I had to remind myself time and again to solve the puzzle first, then try and try and optimize it.
While the games are fun on their own, I recommend playing them at the same time as a friend. Trash-talking about finding more optimal solutions really added to the overall fun of playing the games.
> 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.
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.
"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!
It's one of my favorite visual novels and is so underappreciated.
Maybe it's because (unlike others in the VN space) it totally eschews unusual settings, gimmicks, or flashy set pieces to sell itself... I only bought it because I liked the tidbits of story in Shenzhen and Infinifactory, by the same author. Every part of it is unbelievably strong though.
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
I've been writing a game off and on that's sort of at the intersection of a Zachtronics game and... Starcraft? I guess? With some Factorio in there, for good measure.
The idea is that you have to break into and exfiltrate data from a laboratory that uses their own transputer-like architecture. Write a mobile program to explore the network, another to start migrating the data, and so on. Migrate too hard and the humans notice and reboot the network, kicking you out. There could be other players in there too. Of course, the nodes run the lab's terrible version of Forth. There's no UI, you connect via a TCP socket, and are expected to write your own tooling.
I'm not sure if this is a good idea or if I'm having a psychotic break.
Exapunks and TIS-100 were a huge influence on my career trajectory.
I was always scared of assembly and low level stuff as a kid / college student, who mostly was trying to learn from random sites that assumed a lot of CS background.
Even though they're not near the complexity of x86, these games made me realize that assembly isn't really that scary. I still don't daily drive x86, but they gave me the confidence to go through a few Advent of Code and Project Euler problems. Having a really stripped down assembler was a fantastic learning tool!
Without them, I'd probably still only be working in Python (which is a great language, but abstracts a lot)
Some irony in so many posts about AI becoming more capable at programming, at the same time, top post on hackernews is a game about where you code by reading a magazine like it's 1997.
Printing the physical zines in exapunks as a reference was very cool, and a good throwback to when games shipped with boxes and detailed manuals.
Spacechem was my intro to Zachtronics, and it consumed me when it came out. The concept of instructions inside the actual work area is amazing and still makes my head spin. I consider beating Ω-Pseudoethyne one of my top coding/steam achievements.
I fell off for a bit because the leaderboard grind against friends felt draining, but rekindled my joy by mostly ignoring them (Unless I'm way out of distribution). I'm so glad Zach and the team are back.
Reminds me of one of my favorite games: Hacknet (https://hacknet-os.com - https://store.steampowered.com/app/365450/Hacknet/). Likely contributed in a meaningful way to me becoming a programmer. I think I have Zachtronic's SHENZHEN I/O on my wishlist—will have to check out his whole catalog.
Always wish Exa could scale a little more. I understand that it's supposed to stay at the low level of coding, but when i realized unfolding loops was a very valid way to improve your score, I learned a lot, and also realized it's not quite for me.
All the joys of code reuse (as silly as that might sound) do get kinda lost in the game. I still loved it, but I'd kill for a sequel that was a little higher level on the tooling.
bought opus magnum recently fun game, I have played exapunks a while back, it's not my cup of tea. I love programming for fun, but the language didn't gel with me. I liked their other games better, opus magnum is definitely in the top 2
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!
Exapunks was my first Zach-like and I loved it. It and most other Zachtronics games have a very well-tuned difficulty curve that pushes me out of my comfort zone just the right amount. I think getting stuck for short periods of time makes for a good puzzle game.
I finished Opus Magnum a couple weeks ago and I found it a little frustrating because of the same reasons you brought up. The game doesn't force me to be clever; I can be as simplistic and inefficient as I like. I did go out of my way to design a couple efficient designs, but it didn't feel especially rewarding.
FWIW, my favorite game from them is Last Call BBS. It has several great "mini"games that feel rewarding to just complete.
Opus Magnum is one of the most polished Zachtronics games IMO. The presentation is great.
Exapunks can be pretty tricky with the distributed nature, which share some similarities with TIS-100. Like Opus Magnum, though, there are no restrictive code size limits, meaning that some puzzles can be solved with brute force masses of code. It's not as bad as Shenzhen I/O where you have to deal both with a tiny MCU and routing.
2. It's somehow more-pleasing to watch a mechanical (albeit simulated) 3D machine do work, contrasted to the flickering playgrounds of Exapunks or Shenzhen IO.
If and only if you think excel spreadsheets are games.
This is one of the "solutions" for this game:
GRAB 300
MARK SERVE
COPY M X
TEST X = 0
TJMP END
MARK SEARCH
TEST F = X
TJMP REPLACE
SEEK 1
TEST EOF
FJMP SEARCH
COPY X M
SEEK -9999
JUMP SERVE
MARK REPLACE
COPY F M
SEEK -9999
JUMP SERVE
MARK END
HALT
Your "reward" for typing this nonsense out is watching an animation which may as well just be a newgrounds flash game.
Genuinely if you get a kick out of this you're just a dullard pretending to be intelligent. Do work or play games. Pretending to do work is completely mindless behavior. I really can't believe there's this lame ad on the front page for what is essentially a crummy newgrounds game that wastes your time and teaches you NO SKILLS.
"actually it teaches you [blah blah blah]": not a single player will walk away from this having learned how to write class structure, create an API, or query a SQL database. It's clowny and laughable.
The official "spiritual successor" seems to be Coincidence studio - their games in the genre being "Kaizen: A Factory Story" and the recent "U.V.S. Nirmana".
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!
For those who don't know -- while Zachtronics is no longer making games, Zach Barth is still active now under the company Coincidence Games. They just game out with a spacecraft engineering puzzle game:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2536720/UVS_Nirmana/?cura....
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.
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.
18 replies →
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.
1 reply →
> 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.
2 replies →
Maybe he sold his company, or never completely owned the name himself?
1 reply →
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!
This is the guy who invented Minecraft.
He now appears to be inventing 0x10c? ;)
This is also an advertisement.
I think it's sporting to pay for advertising and not sporting to try and sneak it in on people.
The person who submitted this doesn’t seem to have anything to do with Zachtronics, why are you assuming it’s an ad?
This is one of my all time favorite games. It and Shenzhen I/O do a wonderful job of capturing the essence of what makes programming fun and put them into a game.
My biggest surprise from playing EXAPUNKS is how futile it is to try and pre-optimize a solution. I had to remind myself time and again to solve the puzzle first, then try and try and optimize it.
While the games are fun on their own, I recommend playing them at the same time as a friend. Trash-talking about finding more optimal solutions really added to the overall fun of playing the games.
> 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.
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.
4 replies →
Their catalogue is well worth buying.
https://store.steampowered.com/developer/zachtronics
"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!
I'm good friends with the writer of Eliza. If you enjoyed it, you might like his novel.
https://matthewseiji.com/process
It's one of my favorite visual novels and is so underappreciated.
Maybe it's because (unlike others in the VN space) it totally eschews unusual settings, gimmicks, or flashy set pieces to sell itself... I only bought it because I liked the tidbits of story in Shenzhen and Infinifactory, by the same author. Every part of it is unbelievably strong though.
I think about this game often
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
I've been writing a game off and on that's sort of at the intersection of a Zachtronics game and... Starcraft? I guess? With some Factorio in there, for good measure.
The idea is that you have to break into and exfiltrate data from a laboratory that uses their own transputer-like architecture. Write a mobile program to explore the network, another to start migrating the data, and so on. Migrate too hard and the humans notice and reboot the network, kicking you out. There could be other players in there too. Of course, the nodes run the lab's terrible version of Forth. There's no UI, you connect via a TCP socket, and are expected to write your own tooling.
I'm not sure if this is a good idea or if I'm having a psychotic break.
I'd play it.
Exapunks and TIS-100 were a huge influence on my career trajectory.
I was always scared of assembly and low level stuff as a kid / college student, who mostly was trying to learn from random sites that assumed a lot of CS background.
Even though they're not near the complexity of x86, these games made me realize that assembly isn't really that scary. I still don't daily drive x86, but they gave me the confidence to go through a few Advent of Code and Project Euler problems. Having a really stripped down assembler was a fantastic learning tool!
Without them, I'd probably still only be working in Python (which is a great language, but abstracts a lot)
Some irony in so many posts about AI becoming more capable at programming, at the same time, top post on hackernews is a game about where you code by reading a magazine like it's 1997.
Printing the physical zines in exapunks as a reference was very cool, and a good throwback to when games shipped with boxes and detailed manuals.
Spacechem was my intro to Zachtronics, and it consumed me when it came out. The concept of instructions inside the actual work area is amazing and still makes my head spin. I consider beating Ω-Pseudoethyne one of my top coding/steam achievements.
I fell off for a bit because the leaderboard grind against friends felt draining, but rekindled my joy by mostly ignoring them (Unless I'm way out of distribution). I'm so glad Zach and the team are back.
I unlocked the Redshift handheld video game system; became obsessed and made a video player ( https://www.reddit.com/r/exapunks/comments/tzv1m5/redshift_v... ) among other things. So fun! I should progress past Redshift.
Reminds me of one of my favorite games: Hacknet (https://hacknet-os.com - https://store.steampowered.com/app/365450/Hacknet/). Likely contributed in a meaningful way to me becoming a programmer. I think I have Zachtronic's SHENZHEN I/O on my wishlist—will have to check out his whole catalog.
85% off and $1.49 USD right now for the summer sale
I haven't played this, but just reading the description...
> Learn to hack from TRASH WORLD NEWS, the underground computer magazine.
It seems like a missed opportunity not to name-drop 2600. But I guess they wouldn't be allowed to do that anyway.
TWN is totally 2600 fanfic. Except for the part where it's got a bit too much in the way of gorgeous art. Same size, same rhythms, same vibe. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=25151...
Always wish Exa could scale a little more. I understand that it's supposed to stay at the low level of coding, but when i realized unfolding loops was a very valid way to improve your score, I learned a lot, and also realized it's not quite for me.
All the joys of code reuse (as silly as that might sound) do get kinda lost in the game. I still loved it, but I'd kill for a sequel that was a little higher level on the tooling.
The thing is, you can play it in any way you like. You don't have to optimize for speed at all if you don't enjoy it
Older, but I love me some Zachtronics.
I spent so so much time playing SpaceChem. My favorite game of all time.
bought opus magnum recently fun game, I have played exapunks a while back, it's not my cup of tea. I love programming for fun, but the language didn't gel with me. I liked their other games better, opus magnum is definitely in the top 2
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!
Exapunks was my first Zach-like and I loved it. It and most other Zachtronics games have a very well-tuned difficulty curve that pushes me out of my comfort zone just the right amount. I think getting stuck for short periods of time makes for a good puzzle game.
I finished Opus Magnum a couple weeks ago and I found it a little frustrating because of the same reasons you brought up. The game doesn't force me to be clever; I can be as simplistic and inefficient as I like. I did go out of my way to design a couple efficient designs, but it didn't feel especially rewarding.
FWIW, my favorite game from them is Last Call BBS. It has several great "mini"games that feel rewarding to just complete.
Opus Magnum is one of the most polished Zachtronics games IMO. The presentation is great.
Exapunks can be pretty tricky with the distributed nature, which share some similarities with TIS-100. Like Opus Magnum, though, there are no restrictive code size limits, meaning that some puzzles can be solved with brute force masses of code. It's not as bad as Shenzhen I/O where you have to deal both with a tiny MCU and routing.
I think I liked Infinifactory the most because:
1. It had the least overlap with my day-job work.
2. It's somehow more-pleasing to watch a mechanical (albeit simulated) 3D machine do work, contrasted to the flickering playgrounds of Exapunks or Shenzhen IO.
Every zachtronics game is a gem.
If and only if you think excel spreadsheets are games.
This is one of the "solutions" for this game:
GRAB 300
MARK SERVE COPY M X TEST X = 0 TJMP END MARK SEARCH TEST F = X TJMP REPLACE SEEK 1 TEST EOF FJMP SEARCH COPY X M SEEK -9999 JUMP SERVE
MARK REPLACE COPY F M SEEK -9999 JUMP SERVE
MARK END HALT
Your "reward" for typing this nonsense out is watching an animation which may as well just be a newgrounds flash game.
Genuinely if you get a kick out of this you're just a dullard pretending to be intelligent. Do work or play games. Pretending to do work is completely mindless behavior. I really can't believe there's this lame ad on the front page for what is essentially a crummy newgrounds game that wastes your time and teaches you NO SKILLS.
"actually it teaches you [blah blah blah]": not a single player will walk away from this having learned how to write class structure, create an API, or query a SQL database. It's clowny and laughable.
I think that only a fraction of spreadsheets are games, but I enjoy a much larger fraction of Zachtronics' catalog.
My favourite Zach game so far is Infinifactory. TIS-100 was also fun, until it started feeling like work.
I wish Zach would start making games again. :-(
The official "spiritual successor" seems to be Coincidence studio - their games in the genre being "Kaizen: A Factory Story" and the recent "U.V.S. Nirmana".
He never stopped, he’s just under a different label: https://coincidence.games/
They’ve released two Zach-likes, Kaizen and UVS Nirmana.
Blatant self promotion, but if you want the full story, he chatted to me about it on Software Engineering Daily after the release of Kaizen: https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2025/12/18/designing-in...
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!
1 reply →
This is an excellent interview; thanks for posting it.
https://coincidence.games/uvs-nirmana/
embedded youtube video on an advertisement site
how do I unsubscribe from your blog's ads?