Just for Fun: How did you get into Nature and Planet Zoo?

[Orkan]

(Pasted from my post in Winter ‘23)

How did you get into nature, animals, zoo games, and eventually Planet Zoo?

I’ll go first!

When I was a wee little tot, my parents sent me to a private preschool. It was very focused on teaching through nature and they always had us learn about that sort of thing. That’s where I developed my love for the natural world and animals. Zoo days were my favorite, and I was always very interested in the habitat design and arrangement. I would always come home and me and my sister would set up our own zoo with stuffed animals around the house. I would draw maps for fictional zoos and think of what animals it could have and where they would be. As I got older, I didn’t go to zoos as much and lost that little bit for the rest of my life.

That was until, last winter.
I was sitting on the couch watching YouTube, when I got an ad for the Planet Zoo Grasslands Pack. I didn’t skip it, just let it play. This was the zoo designer I had always wished existed when I was a kid! I purchased the game and played it for the first time. My first animal was Red Deer. I fell in love with it immediately and played it nonstop in all my free time. That brings us to June of last year, right after the Arid Pack released. That’s when I joined this Forum and met some of the best people I have in my life that share their passion for nature and animals that I had forgotten about. I just want to say that Planet Zoo and these forums have changed my life. For the better.

 

[FlameWizard492]

I remember having this fascination with animals and zoos as far back as I can remember. One of my earliest memories was at ZooTampa (back when it was called Lowry Park Zoo). I fell in love with the animals, especially the elephants. They were my favorite! I also remember going on the safari ride through the African exhibits and seeing the manatees in the underwater viewing area. The even used to have camel rides. I’m sad that they got rid of them though.

Flash forward to the mid to late 2000’s when I started playing Zoo Tycoon and Zoo Tycoon 2, which quickly became my favorite games. Many years later, I even asked for an Xbox for Christmas so I could play that version of the game. I had also dipped my toes into Roller Coaster Tycoon 3, which eventually led to my love for Planet Coaster. Then, when Planet Zoo was announced, I was OVER THE MOON!!!!!

There. That’s how it all happened.

 

[LindaBroer]

Don't remember a time I didn't love animals. We always had multiple pets in the house (cats, dogs, guinnea pigs, a huge aviary in the back of the garden, etc.). Also always liked going to zoos. Many, many fond memories of that growing up.

As for PZ, well I liked JWE and was playing that when PZ was announced. I decided to try it in the beta and fel in love. Have been playing ever since.

 

[Purple_Possum]

Nature - Always been a nature lover & lived in rural areas!
Animals - studied animal courses at college & university, did various zoo keeping jobs at 2 different zoos, 1 aquarium for a while & then a rehab center.
Zoo games - played zoo tycoon briefly when I was younger but never been much of a gamer. was more into building on the sims as a kid.
Planet Zoo - saw a funny video on youtube & thought i'd give it a go for fun, then realised how good planet zoo was in terms of building & playing!

 

[synthetase]

Nature - maybe from when I was very little we were living in Virginia. The trees were tall and especially beautiful during fall! We would also go to the beach and sit in the very edge of the water and I always loved the waves, even if they frightened me a little!

Animals - that's a good question, I've always loved animals from my earliest memories. Such as I was so tiny I can hardly remember when my mom showed me how to pet a cat in the right direction. But I was so in love with that cat.

Zoo games - Since the first Zoo Tycoon! Of course it all led to PZ...

 

[Annie_konik]

Nature and animals have been my main interests and hobbies since early childhood, together with art. Cats, dogs, and horses at first, but the more I learned, the more I liked all kinds of creatures.
I used to build little zoos with animal figures on the floor as a kid (a long time ago...). Having a zoo-building video game is a bit similar to that kind of play. I bought Planet Zoo this summer, and it's my first zoo-building game. It's interesting to hear people mentioning ZT, I never had this game. My friend recommended PZ to me some time ago, but I thought it was quite expensive. Thankfully, I got it during the sale on Steam, and it was SO worth it! I love it!

 

[biggest_dreamer]

I've been obsessed with animals for as long as I can remember. I had countless dogs and cats and budgies and cockatiels and aquarium fish as a kid. One of my earliest memories is taking a stack of printer paper and drawing an animal on each sheet and spreading them out across my grandparents' entire living room floor.

I started zoo games with Zoo Tycoon, which followed from my existing Roller Coaster Tycoon obsession. I tried Zoo Tycoon 2, but was put off by how different it was and never revisited it. Tried several other zoo games over the years but nothing else ever felt right until Planet Zoo came around.

 

[Marvinb]

Nature and animals: As far as i can remember i was always fascinated with animals, regardless of their number of legs and if they had fur, feather or scales. My parents house is about 10 walking minutes away from a forest and a couple ponds, so naturally ive spend alot of my childhood there looking for frogs and other critters, building huts with my friends and the usual outdoor kid stuff . I still vividly remember finding an adder one day and stopping my firend from making a big mistake and picking it up.
Also i was really interested in prehistory, yeah i was that dinosaur kid (Still am tbh)
And having a zoo in 15 driving distance from my home, which is free entry was awesome as a child, some sommers me and my family must have went there like every other weekend.
As i grew older i never lost that fascination with nature, biology and natural history, which fed into me eventually getting into the reptile keeping hobby and i also wouldnt be crafting dinosaur models for a living without that interest in nature. So im really glad for the setting i grew up in, cant imagine how my life would have differed if i grew up in a big city.

Zoo games and PZ: Being a kid interested in animals it was kinda inevitable that id some day stumble into Zoo tycoon, im pretty sure i randomly came across it while parents were shopping for a new tv? microwave? and i got really bored of the salesman talking so i wandered the electronic store. It must have been probably 2003 since im pretty sure i got Zoo Tycoon 2, which released in 2004, not too long after. So yeah i played it quite a bit in my childhood, but eventually stopped.
So about 15 years pass and i came across the new Zoo Tycoon on steam, due to nostalgia i instantly bought it and was super excited to play it. But yeah the game was mega boring and i stopped playing after half an hour, went onto the internet to see if i was the only one feeling like this and saw people mentioning Planet Zoo as a way better alternative.
So i looked up this Planet zoo and it looked like everything i could want from a zoo game, bought it and played it. And the only thing i regret is spending that 40€ on Zoo Tycoon

 

[Chuditch]

My love of nature is probably attributable to my early years - although I was born and still live within a capital city, my family went on several cross-country roadtrips each year from when I was only a few months old to when I was about 8, with Central Australia, the Top End and north Queensland being especially common destinations for us. Many of my fondest childhood memories come from these wild places, all those magical landscapes and special encounters with wildlife, and I still feel more at home out bush than I do in the city.

In regards to animals, I became obsessed with dinosaurs fairly early on and was a stereotypical dinosaur kid from about 4-11 years of age, and my love of palaeonology has never really left me (although I'm more of a Cenozoic nerd than a dinosaur nerd nowadays). However, my interests shifted significantly after I picked up a book on Australian birds at the library one day and instantly found a new obsession in modern animals, especially native wildlife. Although by then we weren't travelling as much (school commitments mostly), I spent much of my spare time in my high school years birdwatching down the river, spotlighting marsupials in the hills and chasing lizards and brown snakes through the coastal dunes. I'm now studying a wildlife conservation course at uni in the hopes of getting some kind of career in field ecology, and now that I'm more independent I've also begun travelling further afield again to try and see as many native species in the wild as I can.

Jurassic Park Operation Genesis and Zoo Tycoon 2 were my two favourite games growing up, so zoo sims have just always held a special place in my heart. Understandably, this meant I was ecstatic when Frontier announced Planet Zoo, and I even upgraded from my old laptop to a new custom PC just to make sure I could play it on launch. However, I only ended up playing the game for a few weeks before the steep learning curve got the better of me - nonetheless, my interest in PZ was instantly rekindled with the announcement of the Australia Pack, and I've been playing semi-consistently ever since.

 

[DarthQuell]

Copy-paste from other thread:

I'm honestly not even sure. I guess it's because I've always been revolved around nature and pets.

My dad is from Argentina, and he lived on an island on the Paraná River, so he grew up outside with snakes, caimans, and piranhas.
My mom is from East Texas, so she grew up in the country playing in the woods.

I guess it just runs in my family. I frequently visit the place my mom grew up and go exploring in the woods myself. I've had lots of encounters with wildlife, like coyotes, wild boar, and bobcats. Ice also always had pets growing up, including birds, dogs, cats, bunnies, fish, crawfish, lizards, and frogs. I also would always go to the Houston Zoo, so growing up I was kinda half-and-half: country boy and city boy. I had/have tons of animal encyclopedias and dinosaur encyclopedias, as well.

About videogames, I grew up on Zoo Tycoon 1 and Zoo Tycoon 2, as well as Jurassic Park Operation Genesis. I also played The Sims Unleashed, which added pets to the game, and games like Impossible Creatures, Spore, & SimSafari. Eventually, my cousin showed me Planet Zoo, and I got the game a few months later

 

[Marvinb]

My love of nature is probably attributable to my early years - although I was born and still live within a capital city, my family went on several cross-country roadtrips each year from when I was only a few months old to when I was about 8, with Central Australia, the Top End and north Queensland being especially common destinations for us. Many of my fondest childhood memories come from these wild places, all those fantastical landscapes and special encounters with wildlife, and I still feel more at home out bush than I do in the city.

In regards to animals, I became obsessed with dinosaurs fairly early on and was a stereotypical dinosaur kid from about 4-11 years of age, and my love of palaeonology has never really left me (although I'm more of a Cenozoic nerd than a dinosaur nerd nowadays). However, my interests shifted significantly after I picked up a book on Australian birds at the library one day and instantly found a new obsession in modern animals, especially native wildlife. Although by then we weren't travelling as much (school commitments mostly), I spent much of my spare time in my high school years birdwatching down the river, spotlighting marsupials in the hills and chasing lizards and brown snakes through the coastal dunes. I'm now studying a wildlife conservation course at uni in the hopes of getting some kind of career in field ecology, and now that I'm more independent I've also begun travelling further afield again to try and see as many native species in the wild as I can.

Jurassic Park Operation Genesis and Zoo Tycoon 2 were my two favourite games growing up, so zoo sims have just always held a special place in my heart. Understandably, this meant I was ecstatic when Frontier announced Planet Zoo, and I even upgraded from my old laptop to a new custom PC just to make sure I could play it on launch. However, I only ended up playing the game for a few weeks before the steep learning curve got the better of me - nonetheless, my interest in PZ was instantly rekindled with the announcement of the Australia Pack, and I've been playing semi-consistently ever since.

Ah i see your a fellow natural history enjoyer aswell

 

[Chuditch]

Ah i see your a fellow natural history enjoyer aswell

Once a dinosaur kid, always a dinosaur kid

 

[Marvinb]

Once a dinosaur kid, always a dinosaur kid

Amen

 

[Captain Callum]

Once a dinosaur kid, always a dinosaur kid

I hate how true this is, for me i cycled through all of them

 

[Orkan]

There are 2 kinds of Dinosaur kids:

The cringey kind that brings in dino stuffed animals to school everyday

The chill kind that randomly brings up dino facts.

I was the second kind, but I knew someone of the first kind.

 

[DarthQuell]

There are 2 kinds of Dinosaur kids:

The cringey kind that brings in dino stuffed animals to school everyday

The chill kind that randomly brings up dino facts.

I was the second kind, but I knew someone of the first kind.

I was the 2nd kind. You know, I have these very very old toy dinosaurs, Imaginext dinosaur series (2004). I've had them for 15 years, y'all, and I now have them set up in the trailer up at the farm. And I admit, even at my 22 2/3 of age, I sometimes start messing with them and playing with the dinosaurs.

I'm a kid at heart

 

[Captain Callum]

How did you get into nature, animals, zoo games, and eventually Planet Zoo?

I know i briefly answered this on the winter thread but ill go into more detail here.

Nature - Well pretty easy since i live in a rural community in the scottish highlands. Nature is very accessible with recreational trails basically everywhere (we call them walks for the easy routes or hillwalking for the difficult routes). I love nature, i hate urban life.

Animals - Well skipping the usual ABC animal learning in early school life, animals comes in hand with nature. However i only really started to appreciate animal life in the last decade or so, it took trips around the east coast usa and exploring all the parts of scotland to realise how much i love watching animals. Mostly birds though, mammal watching apart from domestic animals is rather difficult where i live. Only the odd sight of a roe deer and red squirrel satisfy any mammal wildlife watching.

Zoo Games - Planet zoo is my first zoo game, i never played any of the zoo games considering i never developed an interest in animals until my late childhood which by that point all the zoo games were rather dated or the disappointment of the newer zoo tycoon which i skipped due to reviews. What i was playing when everyone else was playing zoo tycoon was this absolute banger:

Planet Zoo - I think i started playing elite dangerous because i was in the space phase of the mandatory childhood phase rotation, i had visited the kennedy space center in florida having seen one of the last few space shuttles on the launchpad as part of a special tour. From elite dangerous, then came planet coaster then finally planet zoo. I was mainly on and off planet zoo from 2019 - late 2021 where i then dived into my real zoo recreations where planet zoo is one of the very few games i play these days.

 

[NachoB]

No cool story. Ever since i was a little kid felt a strong attraction to Nature and animals. So transition to playing zoo games was pretty natural lol and since i usted to love building in zoo Tycoon when Planeta Zoo came out i obviously had to buy it.

 

[Orkan]

About the Xbox zoo tycoon, why was everything Chef Boyardee??? Did anyone notice it?

 

[LindaBroer]

I know I already answered, but I completely forgot to add this tidbit. My love for animals/nature went so far that I pretty much always knew I wanted to work with animals one day. I ended up going to university studying biology only to find out that the 'working with animals' part really wasn't my thing. Now I study DNA for a living. Hey, DNA is the blueprint of life so I'm kind of working with animals, right? Right?