> Except MoPaQ weren't zips

I meant zipping colloquially as in compressing an archive format. But you seem to get the gist of it ;)

> in Blizzard games, those were "zips" of heavy data files, notably read only data blobs. The game would read them, unpack in memory, and serve appropriately.

Not just game files but also the map format for Warcraft 3 was a glorified MPQ (source: https://867380699.github.io/blog/2019/05/09/W3X_Files_Format).

So whenever you edited a WC3 map, you were zipping the current map into an archive. Much like the GIMP example. Of course, WC3 didn't use as many XML files, though SC2 changed that.