Comment by jawarner

4 days ago

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....

49 comments

jawarner

Reply
comeonbro  4 days ago

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.

  • krispykrem  4 days ago

    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.

  • jna_sh  4 days ago

    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.

    • comeonbro  4 days ago

      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".

      From other comments in this thread, it seems I am not the only one who misinterpreted that as not including Zach himself

  • saghm  4 days ago

    > 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.

    • bspammer  4 days ago

      Listening to the podcast linked elsewhere in this thread, it sounds like he’s not at all reached the level of financial independence to indefinitely fund future projects. In fact the only game that went moderately viral (Opus Magnum) is not owned by him at all.

      This is really disappointing to me as many of his games are some of my favourite games of all time and I assumed he’d be set for life off them. I guess the target audience is just too small.

      2 replies →

  • mattbee  4 days ago

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

    • komadori  4 days ago

      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.

palisade  3 days ago

thank you, buying both their games. i'm a big fan of his entire series. i'd just assumed he was gone off the scene

there's also ARGs hidden in all of them, not sure if you're all aware of that

bobbytheblkbear  4 days ago

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.

  • bspammer  4 days ago

    The person who submitted this doesn’t seem to have anything to do with Zachtronics, why are you assuming it’s an ad?

  • fragmede  4 days ago

    If jawarner isn't being paid to make the post, then it's not an advertisement, unless you're using a broader definition for advertisement than is commonly accepted.