Zillions of Games is going away

Courtesy of the official forums:

Posted by Jon Steven Nelson (Jonn99) on Wednesday, June 19, 2013 - 2:12 pm:

ZILLIONS-OF-GAMES WILL BE CONTRACTUALLY DELETED ON FEB 28, 2015

ZOG will be contractually deleted on Feb 28, 2015 -> all zrf's will be discarded -> Mallett and Lefler broke up, and split and quit -> Karl Scherer is trying to create a duplicate ZOG interface, to try to salvage some of the zrf's

For those unfamiliar with it, Zillions of Games is a 1998 general purpose board-game program. The basic premise was that you put the rules into the game and the computer would play with varying competency against you based on its internal scoring of victory states and a game decision tree. Sadly, this was probably inevitable. Zo G has not been updated for probably a good decade. Kind of a shame, though, because I don't know if an equivalent exists.

Ummm...

Wow? Yeah, don't really know how to react to this one. While it's always a bummer to see a unique program go to waste, it wasn't a very influential one from what I've gathered. And from what I'm reading it's definitely not my sort of gaming pie (or a lot of other people's either).

And, as it turns out, the announcement might not be coming from anyone of influence in the company, but may be a hoax taking advantage of some temporary data outages on the site.

ZoG was pretty big back in the day, especially in the variant chess community, but the company hasn't really done anything with it. I'm hoping that Axiom, the open source replacement, is in better shape (Axiom started as a plug-in AI system for ZoG but eventually became its own beast).

Heh. Someone posted a message on the ZoG boards about how to create mounting and unmounting pieces and I was able to provide a solution. I'm pretty dang proud of myself.

Is there any reason for this thread to exist, at this point?

I'm putting this thread on my watchlist so I'll see if there's a response. If the news that lunched the thread is not true or relevant, we might as well lock or delete this thread.

Comments?

Kill it with fire?

And send some of that lunch my way; Pringles aren't as filling as one might think.

Rename as just "Zillions of Games general" or something?

I'm not interested in discussing this game, but somebody may.

I think I'll just lock this thread. If someone wants to start a proper thread for the company/site itself just go ahead and do that, rather than having the distraction from this thread's opening to derail the conversation.