The recent Southeast Asia animal pack prompted me to get back into the game, and I spent my recent holiday meticulously constructing hippo zones and reptile pits with the exact melancholy fervour of Ben from Parks & Rec when he gets really depressed and takes up stop-motion animation. I’ve been having a fantastic time with Planet Zoo of late. But in the words of the poster for Jurassic Park: The Lost World, something has survived. The pigshit-heavy ambience of the Warthog Reactor Matrices faded from save files, and across thousands of PCs, the squawking of the birdmills was silenced at last. Luckily, Planet Zoo was rapidly patched out of its dystopian state, and given an economic model better suited to its original, pro-conservation ethos. The only way out of this monotony was through quite literal brute force: by creating zoos that were little more than sprawling factories, churning out hundreds of inbred, genetically bungled animals in the desperate hope of one day being able to afford a mediocre crocodile. Early birds hoarded orangutans and the like in vast sheds from the word go, driving most animals into stratospheric price positions, and trapping the vast majority of the playerbase in a reeking purgatory of ostriches, warthogs and peafowl. Inevitably, however, players gamed the living crikey out of the market, and - as I documented at the time - the wheels fell off with a resounding clang. By trading healthy, happy animals with other player zoos, it was supposed, folks could work their way gradually towards the purchase of prestigious creatures like pandas, gorillas and ‘phants.
In order to buy into breeding programmes for high-profile endangered species, players first had to prove their credentials with the husbandry of more mundane beasts. There was a brief and special period, just after the launch of delightful menagerie management game Planet Zoo, during which the game’s simulated global economy went deeply and deliciously wrong.
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