ZSNES became a real discovery back in the 90s – an emulator that could run best SNES games at full speed even on modest PCs of the time. It was wildly popular, and I think most gamers of a certain age have vague memories of its simple yet iconic user interface. Programmer zsKnight had no idea about her popularity until EA suddenly wanted to hire him.
zsKnight recently came out of the shadows for rare interview with another legend of the early emulation scene: Zophar, yes, of Zophar's Domain website. The long interview touches on an interesting topic: our friends from PC gamer picked out a few highlights, but zsKnight's explanation of how he realized the popularity of ZSNES is especially fascinating.
The only hint of zsKnight's popularity was the emails he received, about “a couple dozen” every day. “I realized it was quite popular, but I didn't really know how popular it was,” he says, and his “movement” was simply to create a good emulator.
“What's interesting is that I discovered how popular he was when I joined EA. Because I joined EA through an emulator,” explains zsKnight. Unfortunately, I can't make out the name of the publishing person who zsKnight says contacted him, but the contact “sort of asked me, 'Hey, do you want to work at EA?'
“I thought, 'Oh, sure.' So I went there and everyone who interviewed me knew me as zsKnight. This was the first time in the office. Everyone here knows me, and everyone wants me to work here. One person told me, “Oh, I'm here because of you.” I'd say, “Wow, this is amazing.”
One more trivia about ZSNES: We Americans have been pronouncing this word wrong all along. zsKnight is a Canadian language, so it is correctly pronounced “zed-SNES”.
zsKnight has a good reason to suddenly appear in public again: earlier this year he launched a game called Retro Endurance 8bit in Steam Early Access. It contains a bunch of unique retro games combined into a WarioWare-inspired casual mode, and it looks like an absolute treat if you're the type of retro enthusiast with fond memories of the ZSNES.
