There was a brief and special period, just after the launch of delightful menagerie management game Planet Zoo, during which the game’s simulated global economy went deeply and deliciously wrong. The theory was beautiful. In order to buy into breeding programmes for high-profile endangered species, players first had to prove their credentials with the husbandry of more mundane beasts. By trading healthy, happy animals with other player zoos, it was supposed, folks could work their way gradually towards the purchase of prestigious creatures like pandas, gorillas and ‘phants.
Inevitably, however, players gamed the living crikey out of the market, and - as I documented at the time - the wheels fell off with a resounding clang. Early birds hoarded orangutans and the like in vast sheds from the word go, driving most animals into stratospheric price positions, and trapping the vast majority of the playerbase in a reeking purgatory of ostriches, warthogs and peafowl. The only way out of this monotony was through quite literal brute force: by creating zoos that were little more than sprawling factories, churning out hundreds of inbred, genetically bungled animals in the desperate hope of one day being able to afford a mediocre crocodile.
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