Shoot a firework rocket ~ Winners!Make a forum zoo! |
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| Zoo Tycoon 2 Nostalgia; what was your first zoo, mod, etc | |
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| Topic Started: Jul 7 2017, 12:36 PM (1,168 Views) | |
| magpiealamode | Jul 7 2017, 12:36 PM Post #1 |
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No good hero is a one-trick phony.
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The recent discussion regarding the longevity of the game and the community has me looking way back. So, I thought I would start a topic where we can share all those good ol memories. I don't know what the future holds, so I don't want this to be seen as a sort of "here at the end of all things/looking back before we go" type of thread. I'm just curious to see what your best Zoo Tycoon 2 memories are. It just feels good, if a little bittersweet, to talk about the nostalgia. I got the game for my tenth birthday, specifically Zookeeper Collection. I had already played the original demo as well as the Endangered Species demo by that point, so I understood the basics of the game. The first thing I did when I got the game was open up the Okavango Delta map and make a mixed species exhibit with common and pygmy hippos. When I came across the design team Artifex, I had no idea what modding was, and for a split second I legit thought Arabian Nights was some weird BF expansion. Anyway from there I discovered Zoo Admin and had my introduction to modding. After awhile, I moved (among other huge changes in my life) and forgot about ZT2 for awhile. When I became interested in modding again, I discovered Aurora Designs and downloaded their dodo. That was how I discovered this community. Edited by magpiealamode, Jul 7 2017, 01:07 PM.
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| Umpaloompa | Jul 7 2017, 01:11 PM Post #2 |
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~ lore me up ~
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Oh this takes me back... I was introduced to Zoo Tycoon 2 by a friend of mine when I was around 8 or 9. It was love at first sight, really. I then pestered my parents until they bought me the Zookeeper Collection. Subsequently, I bought the two expansions. I joined the community in the official ZT2 forums, all those eons ago, under the username "animallover123456789", very mature. After its downfall, I was still very young and didn't carry on in the community, but I carried on playing. I used to love playing the challenge zoos, which always ended up looking sort of the same, in the large City Zoo map, with that small square being used for an Indian Peafowl exhibit. I remember searching for ZT downloads and I found an Argentinosaurus (*flashback to when I thought dinosaurs were interesting* *shudders*). I didn't manage to put it in my game, though, because I thought just downloading it would immediately make it pop up. Oops. Skip a few years and I move back to Brazil and find my disk, so I start playing Zoo Tycoon 2 again and find the community, namely Tesara during it's beginning stages after the downfall of Environ. After a while, I made many friends here and rose to staff-level, something I've been at Tesara, The Showroom, Gaia and here at TRT, as well as many smaller, failed, forums. I skipped the whole Northern Skies phase, because it was the site that brought down Tesara, my first home, so I left for a while and was never really active there. I've had a few breaks, my activity has dwindled a lot, but I do hold the community close to my heart. |
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| magpiealamode | Jul 7 2017, 01:13 PM Post #3 |
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No good hero is a one-trick phony.
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Oh man, I was part of the official forums as "Utahthief." Just curious, who else here was part of those?
Edited by magpiealamode, Jul 7 2017, 01:15 PM.
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| Lgcfm | Jul 7 2017, 01:27 PM Post #4 |
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The Download Lady
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I'm surprised to hear so many people started with ZT2. I started playing the first Zoo Tycoon, it was a very good game and I really enjoyed campaign mode. I learned a lot about animals from it. When I heard of a sequel and saw the first person mode, I just had to get it. I got all 4 expansions separately (so every time I get a new PC I have to go through I think 6 discs, a total pain). It was years later that I realized there was usermade content for the game, but I thought "my game is not in English so it probably won't work". Turns out it did work but now lang files = no name ingame which bugged me, so I started finding out how to translate stuff and then ended up slowly learning to design from there. |
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| Komodo | Jul 7 2017, 02:25 PM Post #5 |
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Varanus komodoensis
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I've been a lover of nature and animals all my life. With early internet access when I was young, it was only a matter of time I ended up investigating about zoos and their management by myself. I was first introduced to the first Zoo Tycoon in 2005, thanks to a friend who played it. Some years later I got, thanks to a cereal promotion, some zoo simulation games in the vein of ZT and I got quickly obsessed with them. Around 2008-2009 I casually ended up at the spanish Zoo Tycoon 2 website, and when I learned about its expansion packs and animal diversity I pestered my parents a lot until I received the original vanilla game and later the expansion packs. I remember I usually played in challenge mode because I found it more interesting. When I tapped into freeform game, I spent hours and days building entire, functional zoos and managing them for some time. Also, it was EA that made me a fan of prehistoric life and evolution. Thanks to a spanish zoo forum I learned about downloadable mods. I tried to make reskins, but they didn't work very well and I got a bit frustrated with the game until I learned about Radical Remake. That renewed my interest for the game, and so I joined AD's old forum and later NS. Around the same time I met a young ZooHispania and quickly joined that forum too, receiving enough inspiration to restart designing and make my first custom animal (a kodkod) in early 2012. |
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| EsserWarrior | Jul 7 2017, 02:40 PM Post #6 |
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EsserWarrior
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I started off as a Zoo Tycoon One player on my grandma's computer, which introduced me to the Zoo Tycoon franchise. So I would sit on the game for hours, just binge playing the game until I eventually became bankrupt and got depressed when I lost all of my work. When I was introduced to Zoo Tycoon 2, it wasn't by the media or anything. Because when I got the game, I was too young to really know what all of those things were. But when I went to the Target where I bought it, I didn't go in there looking for the game. If I remember correctly, I think I was looking for Wildlife Park 2. But I found Zoo Tycoon 2 instead, it was the Ultimate Collection pack and it was the last one there. Then, as I played the game, I eventually learned there were mods. But I was still to young to get a good grasp on how the moving files process worked. So I'd watch all these YouTube videos of people building these exhibits, and I thought it was the coolest thing ever and thought the animals looked so good! (I don't know if anyone else did this before they had mods, but I'd used to tank walls and elevated paths to make indoor areas because I didn't have mods to make nice ones.) It was a few years ago, not long before I joined this site, that I looked up a YouTube video on how to add them into my game. I was determined to add them into my game, and didn't stop until I learned how. After I managed to figure it out, I rapidly added stuff to my game, because when you first learn how to add, everything looks like something you want to use. |
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| Jumbo | Jul 7 2017, 03:00 PM Post #7 |
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I think I was introduced to the game around 2005, got the Zookeeper Collection after I'd been playing the standard ZT1-game for a while. The following years, I almost gamed it non-stop. Remembering the good feeling always I got, when my zoo ticked 5-stars. I felt like a master. After that I started getting more into re-creating enclosures I'd seen in real-life or liked a lot. Too sad my only building sets at that time were standard tank-walls and the elevated paths, haha My first download was around that time was a Capybara.. Yes. Had many fails trying to build Shamu-Stadium lol, but the fantasy at that time told me it looked "excatly" the same. I think that's a really good thing.As the internet-bug grew on me, I discovered the Radical Remake Marine Mania Trailer and was re-directed to NS. I discovered there was a lot more to zt2 than just a Capybara download. There I also made friends with a lot of good members and designers, under a different username. I became addicted making S&T, but could never finish a zoo lol. Still remember all the drama and forum-battles though. Hah, that one time when Environ/Tesara (can't remember which one) got hacked and the entire zt2 community was all over the place. As NS died, I moved over to Gaia and chatted a lot with Danny and Hendrix at that time. My best memory from that time, was to be a tester of European Expedtions-remake by Hendrix. As the death of Gaia occured, I spent some time here at RT, and left the community to priorite other things. After that I played ZT2 a few times, to check out the new content from RR and Zeta-Designs. Until some weeks ago, when I made the return a far-more stable and undramatic community. It's sad to see that so many members are in-active or retired from ZT2. But at this point, I find the rest of us here as the last survivours, and that we should stick together for as long as it's possible.
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| spartan_squat | Jul 7 2017, 04:30 PM Post #8 |
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DoomSlayer
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I dont know but I feel more nostalgia for the first Zoo Tycoon. It in my trinity videogames along with Doom and Turok. I start playing the game in summer 2002 along with Dinosaur Digs. As I see there are still veterant from my time from Zoo Admin, Zoo Tycoon Unleashed, Zoo Tek...and the ancestral times of ZTV, Zoomania, Gaia, Tesara. One thing I didnt like it after the release of Extinct Animals is how the community was in 2009-2011 (I left that year) were like locusts destroying a field and then moving to another site. Thats a thing I miss from the golden age of Zoo Tycoon was there were many sites that can coexist. Hopefully those times ended... |
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| TheToastinator | Jul 7 2017, 05:27 PM Post #9 |
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A piece of toast and a terminator.
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When I was really young, I got the Zoo Tycoon Complete Collection. It was my favorite game until I discovered and bought the ZT2 Ultimate Collection a couple years later. After numerous unsuccessful attempts to add downloads, I finally figured it out. I built zoos and did the challenges until my disc suddenly broke one day. I got another copy soon after and eventually lost interest for a few years in the game until I found Aurora Designs. By that point, I completely forgot how to download and had to learn how to do it again. I didn't find about the community until summer 2015 and that's when I made an account here.
Edited by TheToastinator, Jul 28 2017, 09:59 AM.
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| Denomon3144 | Jul 7 2017, 06:41 PM Post #10 |
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Pick a god and pray!
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My dad used to play Zoo Tycoon 1 with me when I was VERY young- I was a toddler. I would tell him what to do and he'd do it for me. I ended up getting Zoo Tycoon 2 around a year after it came out. I got the Zookeeper Collection the Christmas after it came out, and I got Marine Mania and Extinct Animals the Christmas after EA came out. Edited by Denomon3144, Jul 7 2017, 06:41 PM.
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| Imperator Furiosa | Jul 7 2017, 08:51 PM Post #11 |
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Chaos Theory
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Zoo Tycoon was one of the first computer games I really got into, I got the first game when I was around 5 (god, was that really 15 years ago?) and absolutely loved it. Then when I got Dinosaur Digs I became completely enthralled since at the time my dream in life was to become a paleontologist. I spent hours trying to beat the campaigns and would show my mother how I played the game because I felt accomplished. Then ZT2 came out when I was 8 and I pretty much forgot about the original (its just as well since my copy of ZT1 had a massive crack in it and would no longer run). I remember being wowed being able to get so close to the animals and to take care of them myself. I had gotten it for Christmas that year and spent the rest of the day on my computer playing it. I was shocked by the animals killing each other though and was heartbroken when my snow leopard killed his son :') But I kept playing, eventually working my way through quite a few campaigns and building my first 5-star zoo. I also played the game a lot with my best friend at the time, we'd take turns playing and caring for the animals. By around my freshman year of high school I took a break from ZT2, deciding it was too "childish" and abandoning it for The Sims 3. Around that time I got a new copy of ZT1 and started passively playing it again at first, eventually getting back into the campaigns. Then around my junior year I stumbled upon ZT2 mods while looking at Sims 3 mods, and the nostalgia of the game came back. I started playing it again and even played a few times with my friend. My senior year of high school and first year of college is when I started to play more regularly. It was a more passive, easy game that brought some relief from what I now know was worsening Generalized Anxiety and OCD. I joined the community officially in early 2016 with this site and ended up meeting really great people, some of whom I now consider very close friends. I started trying to build more seriously and thought about trying to make mods (though I never had the time to do it). I think my remaining time in the community is fairly limited since my interests have shifted a lot and I no longer see myself having a career with animals or even in paleontology, and as soon as my original copy of ZT2: Extinct Animals from 2007 breaks (I know, how very retro) I'll likely be done with the game for good. That being said it'll always have a very special place in my heart and I'll appreciate the relationships I've built thanks to these games, both online and offline. Edited by Imperator Furiosa, Jul 8 2017, 12:26 PM.
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| Umpaloompa | Jul 7 2017, 09:03 PM Post #12 |
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~ lore me up ~
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YES YES YES to both these points... Gosh this topic is taking me back... |
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Jul 8 2017, 10:59 AM Post #13 |
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I remember playing Zoo Tycoon 1 so so long ago. It was after Complete Collection was released for sure, because we only bought Complete Collection, but it was literally ages ago. I was probably about 5 or 6. I had a lot of fun playing it and when I saw Zoo Tycoon 2 we got it, the version with the terrifying chimpanzee pen that has been lost to time. I played that a lot but I was never good at it, but I did a lot of stuff including attempting to make indoor exhibits as far back as Endangered Species (though they were ugly and had to have a stupidly high slope, also I didn't know you could delete the supports under the path while it was invisible). I played the game unmodded up until I found Zootycoon.nl (which I could not understand because I did not and still cannot speak Dutch ) and downloaded various reskins of animals (at the time Marine Mania had just come out so no one had really made extensive mods of these animals yet) and I used them all the time because I thought they were the coolest thing. I didn't know how to download mods without an installer (which almost all of the mods on Zootycoon.nl had for some reason??? I'm not sure why or even who made them) but I was on the search for more and eventually found Zoo Tycoon Volcano in early 2007. I made an account and felt super welcomed and was probably too much for a lot of people, being an eight year old with awful English skills. ![]() After Zoo Tycoon Volcano I branched out to many forums over the years and tried my hand at show n tells but always failed at making them decent because of lack of motivation and awful writing skills. I was also one of those people who had people "make" them an expansion pack called Nocturnal Nightmares, which was going to be 20 nocturnal animals. I did essentially nothing, making a very bad Chinese Giant Salamander skin, and an okayish kiwi skin. There was a demo released of the salamander and a brown hyena, which was going to include an Opossum as well but we cut it out for technical reasons. The expansion was of course never completed, and that was all the work we ever got done on it, and the closest I came to actually being a designer. ![]() Eventually I ended up here. Even when I wasn't playing Zoo Tycoon, I was on these forums for the most part. My longest break was right after Northern Skies moved from Zetaboards and everyone abandoned the site, but that was because Zoo Tycoon 2 wasn't working for me and I really wanted to play it.
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| Dylan | Jul 9 2017, 05:26 AM Post #14 |
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I started playing around 8 but didn't join a community or add downloads until about four years ago. I was in hospital and that a lot of time so I downloaded some Artifex stuff (the dolphin and the deer), and created a fantastic almost vanilla zoo. When I got out, I joined this community (100% for downloads) and wasn't active for about a year. Then I caused Furka he'll for a day, got banned and then started becoming active. I got in too late. By that point many people had left and this only accelerated. The community introduced me to lots of new websites and resources like the AZA guidebooks, zootierliste and ZC and helped me expand on my knowledge of dinosaurs, birds and the needs of zoos in the real world. I wouldn't have met Dr. Lee Durrell in Jersey, or attended lectures in the realm of Dinosaur classification without this community. |
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| Burns | Jul 9 2017, 10:29 PM Post #15 |
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King of Lemurs
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I first got into ZT2 when my uncle gave it to me on my 9th birthday. After quickly going through the gameplay, I wanted more so with my birthday money, I went out and bought the Ultimate Collection from Target. Within the first 3 hours of having it, while removing it from the case I broke the disk. I cried for about 2 hours before my mom told me we can get a new one as long as I told the sales person at Target what had happened. After getting a new copy I worked for about 2 years trying out different things and discovering the world of downloads from Artifex. Unfortunately it took me these 2 years until I was able to get downloads to work. My first download was the Artifex, aye-aye. I pursued other lemurs and joined the community in the summer of 2013. From there I got a few newbie warns but eventually found my niche in the RTZI as well as zoo-building. |
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My first download was around that time was a Capybara.. Yes. Had many fails trying to build Shamu-Stadium lol, but the fantasy at that time told me it looked "excatly" the same. I think that's a really good thing.







) and downloaded various reskins of animals (at the time Marine Mania had just come out so no one had really made extensive mods of these animals yet) and I used them all the time because I thought they were the coolest thing. I didn't know how to download mods without an installer (which almost all of the mods on Zootycoon.nl had for some reason??? I'm not sure why or even who made them) but I was on the search for more and eventually found Zoo Tycoon Volcano in early 2007. I made an account and felt super welcomed and was probably too much for a lot of people, being an eight year old with awful English skills. 



