Zoo Tycoon

Other products by THQ

Product Features

• Start building & managing your zoo right from the start -- plan out your exhibits and design a layout
• Do your very best to please customers and the animals
• Inhabit your zoo with the right animals to draw in the big crowds
• Over 200 animals to exhibit, plus all kinds of new & interesting plant life to help make your zoo more exotic
• Manage your zoo wisely -- meet the needs of both the people and the animals without losing all your money

Product Details

• Our recommended age: 5 - 20 years
• Manufacturer recommended age: 0 months and up
• Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S. and to APO/FPO addresses. For APO/FPO shipments, please check with the manufacturer regarding warranty and support issues.
• ASIN: B00005O1GO
• Item Weight: 1 pounds
• Media: CD-ROM
• Release Date: October 18, 2001
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (251 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #9,070 in Video Games (See Bestsellers in Video Games)
• Discontinued by manufacturer: Yes

Product Description

Platform: PC

Amazon.com Review
Everybody likes the zoo. And why not? Casual walks, exotic animals, and fried foods are good fun. Managing a zoo of your very own is even better. Zoo Tycoon challenges you to build a zoo one path tile, one iron-reinforced fence, and one animal at a time. Zoo Tycoon bears more than just a title similarity to Roller Coaster Tycoon: it appears to be based on the same basic game engine. Building pens and paths, decorating, locating buildings, managing your staff, even the way your patrons look and how you tweak pricing are all extremely similar to the fun and intuitive Roller Coaster Tycoon. The gameplay consists of a series of inventive scenarios--sometimes building a zoo from scratch, other times taking over a failing or failed zoo and bringing it back from the brink.

Specifically, you've got to build pens and habitats with an eye toward the needs of each animal species. For example, putting bears in a savannah setting results in depressed, possibly sick, bears. You also have to tend to your human animals by locating gift shops, restaurants, drink stands, and bathrooms. Then you've got to adopt animals and hire zookeepers to tend your creatures. All of this costs money, but cutting corners can result in irate customers and unhappy animals. Unhappy animals bore people, and worse they make it difficult to adopt more exotic and finicky creatures, like pandas. Happy and well-fed animals will cavort and play, making your guests very happy. And happy guests results in more money for you to improve your zoo.

It's a balancing act keeping all the animals, keepers, and little wandering people happy, but the game is also a decorator sim. You've got to beautify your park, and it's easy to forget the specific scenario objectives and lose yourself in building the ultimate zoo. If you tire of the objectives entirely, you can delete some of your fences and watch the animals run amok on your guests (sometimes, through negligence, they can break free on their own). The carnivores grab, pin, and fling your guests (no blood, and no killing here), which lowers your zoo rating and dissuades people from visiting for a while. Still, it's great fun to watch. --Bob Andrews

Pros:

• Plays like Roller Coaster Tycoon
• Addictive and fun

Cons:

• Plays, maybe, too much like Roller Coaster Tycoon
• Simple graphics

Product Description
Zoo Tycoon puts your ability to design and market your ideas to the test -- see if you can build a world-famous zoo! If you design & manage well, the lions, tigers and bears will be great performers. Plan poorly, and they'll start attacking humans!

See all Product Description

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

58 of 60 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Another Good God Game, September 30, 2001

By	stephanie spicer (Boise, ID) - See all my reviews

This game takes up a lot after the Theme Park series but is a lot more in depth and better in my opinion. You have to keep the customers and your zoo animals happy. You hire animal handlers, tour guides, and clean up crew. If you played Theme Park you will find this game has a lot of the same tests and struggles. You have 50+ different animals to choice from and you get to choose their sex (Yes they reproduce). Now making the pens for your new found friends is fun! You start out with green grass... you have to make the enviroment for all the critters from the jungle to the artic from rocks to waterfalls. This is indeed an intense game. If you like god games you will probably like this...

43 of 45 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Fun for All Ages, January 2, 2002

By	Lisa Shea "LisaShea.com" - See all my reviews (TOP 10 REVIEWER)

The tycoon games get more and more fun as each new one comes out - the developers definitely learn from past experience and build suggestions into the new versions. Zoo Tycoon, the latest release, is about as fun and addictive as you can get!

This is just about the ultimate sim game from a number of points of view. First, like SimThemePark and RollerCoaster Tycoon, you've got the whole "please-your-people" aspect. You want them to have pretty paths to walk on, easy access to food, drink and restrooms, rides and attractions to see. Your visitors love looking at animals, and the happier the animals are, the more the people enjoy their experience.

But in Zoo Tycoon, instead of "boring" rides that you merely maintain, you now have incredibly animated animals! Put in a pair of lions, and you'll find them running around with glee, chasing each other, and lounging on rocks you give them. If you don't give them an environment they enjoy (say arctic tundra with cactusses) they'll pout and growl instead. If they're content, they might even have lion cubs, that you can watch grow over time!

The game is great for kids, adults, and everybody in between. I have friends with 3 computers in their house and all 3 are running this at the same time, as each little zoo is being worked on. You can have lions, tigers and bears ... flamingos and ostriches ... black leopards and rhinos, elephants and giraffes. You can research the ability to work with endangered animals, build aviaries and other special buildings.

The scenarios are great. You take over badly-run zoos, and cringe when you see the concrete-and-steel tiny homes these poor animals had! The pleasure you get when the once-miserable animal runs around its new home, happy and content, is very real. Their free-form games mean that you can build yourself your ideal zoo, too, on any number of map-styles.

Highly, highly recommended as a game that will be enjoyed for months and months!

54 of 59 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excessively COOL Game!, December 28, 2001

A Kid's Review

The lions have escaped, and the panda is very sick, and all of the guests are hungry, and, and, and! Running your own zoo is not always easy. Many things can go wrong, but just as easily they can go right. Like watching the polar bear playing with her new baby or winning awards. In Microsoft's game, Zoo Tycoon, you get to experience running your own zoo with great graphics and features, awesome gameplay, and new suprizes everywhere!

There many games that are great but have terrible graphics. Zoo Tycoon is different. It has many veiw points, and beautiful scenery. All of the animals actually look real and not like robots. The people wander around and you can tell what they're doing. Whether it's sitting on the picnic table or cleaning up Zoo Poo. In conclusion, this games graphics are one of its strong points.

The best part of playing games is playing them! ZT has many features such as baby animals and wild animal escapes that make ZT one step higher than the average computer game. The people are a challenge alone to please and the animals are a whole other story. It is not impossible though and it is fun to get awards and extra cash for making everybody happy with animal toys and burger stands. On the other hand, for the more mischeveous mind, it is just as fun to build a zoo just to terrorize it! So with a last word, ZT is a great game to play, not just to look at its box:)

If you would like to have the full challenge of playing this game with no hints, I advise you do not read the following paragraph.
As in most games there are cheats in ZT. Perhaps you were running out of cash, you could just push Ctrl-4 and you automatically get 10,000 bucks. (do this before you build anythin as it destroys your fences) Or if you were feeling very mean you could name a gueest Alfred H. and birds would come and freak out all the people. Alfred Hitchcock lives on! There are many cheats to either help your zoo or make the people miserable. You can find them on many Zoo Tycoon web sites.

Overall Zoo Tycoon is a great game for all ages to play and I highly recomend it. I enjoyed it!

Pros:
-Great graphics
-Cool Cheats
-You get to pick male or female animals
-The animals have babies
-Good information on the animals
-You get to design exhibits with foilage and decorations
-Freeform or challenge zoos
-In freeform you can have up to 500 thousand dollars
-Terrorize the zoo and its inhabitants with one click of a mouse

-Build a beautiful zoo to please animals, guests and yourself

Cons:
-It can be slightly slow at times
-You can only have right angles on the fences limiting creativity
-The people and animals can be to hard to please

Overall it's a very neato frito game

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