The History of Modding Planet Zoo (and other games...)

The history of modding Planet Zoo and the community around it is intertwined with the history of zoo and dinosaur simulation modding. To celebrate the anniversary of new species mods, this video explores the chronology of the modding scene's members, their exploits in previous titles, their advancements in breaking open Frontier Development's COBRA engine, and their resultant work to lead us now into the current modding situation with Planet Zoo.

Chapters:
0:00 Introduction
1:27 Chapter 1 - Origins
11:09 Chapter 2 - Ascent
17:50 Chapter 3 - Enigma
23:04 Chapter 4 - Breakthrough
29:46 Chapter 5 - Adaptation
39:33 Conclusion

[LeafProductions]

Thank you so much for covering our little corner of the internet. It's been a really fun ride, and we're still making new breakthroughs til this day! I hope some day you revisit us, especially with covering all of the feats by NDP, who has singlehandedly guided us alongside the rest of the Cobra Tool Devs, for the extremely important work he has done. Thank you again for doing this again, we all appreciate it!

[Havok]

Hello! I’m Havok1199 (with my real life username) and I wanted to say thank you for including me in this amazing adventure of making Planet Zoo the ultimate successor of Zoo Tycoon 2 when it comes to modding. Furthermore, you even put in the thumbnail my first new species project ever, the African leopard.
I really can’t say how much I appreciate your hard work and dedication in making this video, which sums up the history of the modding community of a videogame, which reached over 1000 mods in 2 years, including portraying me as one of the “main characters” of this adventure.

I hope we’ll see more about this game and what will eventually come next for it.

Greetings from Italy!

[betlv]

Heya, LilyValley from the ZT2 modding community. I appreciate your feature on the game! I can't help but favor ZT2 over Planet Zoo but... honestly I think it's because it has more moddability. I haven't made the jump to Planet Zoo since I love animating and seeing as those aren't a possibility right now I feel inclined to stick with an oldie-but-goodie PC game that holds a unique place in my world.

[leeaivanel]

Beautiful video! Modders really deserve so much recognition for their hard work

[narwhalermods]

Really good video, seeing the early times of modding in the genera makes one realize how far we've come.

[SerriGaming]

Hi! SibCDC here! Awesome video, can't believe the modding community has come this far. I still remember learning how to code for the first time by reading NDP's PDF tutorial, more than a year later and I've got more than 40 Planet Zoo mods on my name and made a lot of new friends. Let's hope we can continue finding new ways to improve and innovate modding for Planet Zoo, so that next year we'll have a new retrospective to look forward to.

[Kaiodenic]

Brilliant video mate! Fantastic work on gathering all this info and very, very well presented.

[BigBossMan]

I hope someone at Frontier Developments sees this and that they appreciate how important their work is to the sim community.

[dinomation]

Dropping another fantastic video! It’s very interesting to hear all of this history about modding of zoo games!

[awesomeproductions]

It truly is amazing what you can achieve with some coding, passion and a creative vision...
Thoughts on the Wetlands Animal Pack so far?

[wearygm]

Hey ReviewGen, love the video! I also was wondering where your Planet Zoo career mode playthrough went, I really enjoyed watching that!

[jesusmejia]

i been way=tching the what next planet zoo vidoes and some of the animals/pack predicts were right almost all the time

[dodoxasaurus]

"run by the community for the community"

[evanfalvey]

Hey dude, I've seen your videos on jurassic world evolution 1-2, I would love if you can make more of them, showing what you think of the game's progress and what could be added in the future.

[SleepyEngi]

The PDFHost link is not functional, it seems

[SmudgysCoasters]

Did no one ever mod anything into planco?