

Zoo Tycoon 2 pretty much improved everything, allowing for more in-depth gameplay, more animals, and gave the game its needed 3D graphics. Both of these enhanced the original enormously and made the game and its sequel Zoo Tycoon 2 the hugely enjoyable, albeit often slow, challenge they became known for.

Zoo Tycoon also defined the two expansions which would recur in many other zoo builders – the addition of prehistoric life in Dinosaur Digs, and the chance to build an aquarium with Marine Mania. Not only were players able to build the zoos of their dreams, but also play God with the lives of guests, making it doubly fun. In the beginning, the best example of a zoo game was Zoo Tycoon, the first game released by Blue Fang in 2001.

Thankfully the lion’s fence was easy to delete. It also made you contend with the business side (this was before unlimited money) and try to please your customers, who were often obnoxious and demanding no matter what you gave them. This game set the template for every other successful zoo game, giving players a wealth of animals to house and make happy by adjusting their environments. Nature is chaotic, trying to house it can be chaotic, even more so when you deliberately remove the fences. This was the main pleasure I, and many others, derived from the original Zoo Tycoon: Dinosaur Digs in 2002, and one of the reasons that zoo-building games are so much fun compared to other tycoon games. There would be screams as guests tried to run from velociraptors and T-Rexes. When I was a child, nothing worked better to control what little homicidal impulses lay within than building a zoo inexplicably filled with dinosaurs, all of them housed in inescapable pits and dropping visitors one by one into them.
