What exactly is ZXDWare? It’s a question that I’ve been asked a couple of times so far in my life.
The name ZXDWare has its roots back to about when I was only ten years old. One day, whilst playing in the ditch out front of my rural home, I came up with a concept that would be the groundwork for a creative empire. Having been a fan of the Mega Man franchise for countless years beforehand, I was just then really getting into the X series. As most children of the internet era did, I was working on a fan fiction-esque story in which I created a character based off of MMX and elements from an episode of Reboot, “Double Zero,” who was a super powerful ghost version of the character Zero… and that’s just about all of that dreck that I can recall offhand.
“Double Zero,” as all of my other characters that I had created up to that point (“Quattro Yoshi” from the playground in second grade comes to mind), fell out of my interest in fairly quick time. Unlike the rest, however, he did not completely fade into obscurity; rather, he became the basis for the ultimate next step in my creative development: the Gary Sue avatar. He changed from a simple childish retooling into an idealized version of how I viewed myself, becoming a completely overpowered, super smart, storyline driving (sometimes stealing) character who represented everything I wanted to be at that point in time. This was the beginning of Zero X. Diamond, the character whose name I still use in most places around the internet to this very day.
But he was simply the flight of fancy of a child. Looking back now, his framework has heavily deteriorated. Built up from a character in an established franchise, illustrated from stolen and recolored custom sprites, and greatly influenced by sources I now find trite and embarrassing (i.e. Dragonball Z, Tenchi Muyo!, Final Fantasy V, etc.), he is a relic of a period of my creativity that is long forgotten now. Even with that being the case, however, I can’t forget the important stepping stone he was: the first character I ever developed whom I kept an interest in for years on end. To this day, I still sometimes wonder if there’s a way to completely overhaul the character and bring him back into my favor again.
I seriously thought this was a good idea.
As for the actual website, ZXDWare Inc. was founded back in mid 2002 when I was but an eighth grade loser with a terrible haircut and a still developing sense of humor. In its earliest draft, the website was an absolutely hideous page that looked like something out of Geocities. Made with some now forgotten set of web design tools, it was a bright green circuitboard background with burnt looking typewriter lettering reading “Coming Soon” between two “Under Construction” graphics. It also featured the original banner, which even then I eventually realized looked like utterly the worst thing I can possibly imagine. How I ever managed to convince myself that this was a good design in any way, shape, or form is beyond me.
In my vast well of inexperience, I figured that if I wanted to succeed in the world of the internet, I was going to need a more web-savvy co-webmaster to help me set up a better layout and generate more content. This was when my brief partnership with FlatFace, a member of the Starmen.net community which I was then heavily into. At this point, the layout changed into a far less amateurish shape, which wasn’t saying much considering the “Coming Soon” page. It was a single page with a giant picture of Happy Bob (another character of mine who materialized in junior high who I still do things with to this day) followed by a long listing of links to files on the server, punctuated with a looping MP3 from Max Payne. My partnership with FF quickly dissolved over, of all things, an edited B.C. comic strip he was hosting. I was very, very religious at that particular moment in time and the fact that it depicted God masturbating onto a caveman (not visually, mind you, just the sound effect and undetailed white liquid) made me quite upset.
This was the first and easily worst Lawyer Man.
So I chugged on by myself for a little while, continuing with the single page layout for a while. It was in July 2002 that I had my first attempt at 100% original content: Lawyer Man. Lawyer Man was a Mega Man 7-based sprite comic that chronicled the adventures of a cheaply made Japanese robot lawyer who had been manufactured to try and keep up with the demand for attorneys in the crime ridden world of today. He bore an incredibly strong resemblance to Protoman (entirely on purpose, mind you) in that he looked just like him except wearing a brown blazer and a red tie. Also, since he was Japanese, he spoke in poor English. His rival, Attournor, was a malfunctioning previous model who looked like Bass with a brown blazer on and with sunglasses. For some odd reason, Gutsman and Snake Man worked for him. It was a fairly lame comic that featured jumbled storylines that jumped around, lots of lame jokes that fell flat, shameless self-insertion by the author, and more. It only made it to 88 strips over the course of four years, which was really too bad since the later strips were a vast improvement over the first ones. Until I manage to get a new browsing system for the strips up, you can check them out (if you want to) by visiting this page in Internet Explorer. Yeah, that’s right: the old comic browser does not work in Firefox. Alternatively, you can click on the picture and change the number at the end to anything from 1 to 88.
A year later, I started on another sprite comic, one that tanked even faster and harder than Lawyer Man: PixelPower. PixelPower predated Lawyer Man conceptually, and was originally to be a knockoff of OldSkooled only in 16-bit. That didn’t pan out due to the incredible size differences between the graphics of most games that I liked at the time. It ended up being a serious 8-bit Mega Man comic wherein society has become incredibly paranoid of robots after the twenty some attacks of Dr. Wily. The story never got past the first two actual strips (the first four being a recap slightly edited from Mega Man 4′s intro), and it promptly died.
The first strip of TFP9, which sets up the premise of the comic.
In late 2005 came the best of the three, however: Transmissions from Planet 9. This strip was the first that was not a sprite comic in any way; rather, all the art was rendered in different styles, including photos, MS Paint, Paint Shop Pro, and more. More interestingly, it didn’t follow any set storyline, nor did it even attempt to; the comic strip itself was more a collection of short stories or, better still, a series of disjointed non-sequiturs that needed no introduction and no continuity. The only characters who were at all recurring were Death and the cast of “The Losers,” a hardly noteworthy creative abortion that only reached one strip before winding up absorbed into TFP9. Anyhow, the aim was to make a comic that I would be able to update far more regularly thanks to not having to worry about writing a continuous story or having to worry about finding the right sprites and right backgrounds to move it along. Even so, the comic unfortunately petered out due to my sinking into a creative slump. Of the three original comics that ZXDWare has had so far, Transmissions from Planet 9 is the only one which is planned to have a reboot. Also of note, I’ve been on-again-off-again planning a book of short stories by the same name and following the same vague concept as put forth in the first strip for a number of years now, including stories of the immortal men, a man’s nightmares realized on an uncharted planet, the rise and fall of a human fly, and the interactions of a man and a robot with no memories on a deserted world.
Other than that, not very much has come out of ZXDWare over the years. Four films have been made with 3D Movie Maker under a specific ZXDWare label, one of which being a commercial for the site and the others being strange little films relating to random odds and ends I’ve had lying around and what have you. And aside from that, the only other things that we’ve really done to date are two ancient Starmen.net fan games (based off of Windows Solitaire and Gopher-It [a Whack-a-Mole game for Windows 3.1] respectively) and “Happy Bob’s Saturday Night Slash Fest,” a game that I once sold in high school for fifty cents a pop on old floppy disks with crudely printed labels that was secretly based off of the classic shareware title “Mac Blaster.” Which was probably illegal, in hindsight, but I just wanted to grab some quick cash off of my peers.
What’s in store for us in the future? Who can say for sure? We’re looking to potentially gain some affiliates, one of which should be up and running in a matter of months. As for future content, well, there’s a whole treasure trove of stuff that’s sitting here half-finished, just waiting to be finished eventually… and even more that’s yet to be started! Keep on watching us in the future and I’m sure that we’ll have a lot more stuff available for your enjoyment.
Keep on truckin’,
Ian “Zero X. Diamond” Burton
