Jolt Country

This is an article about the game Zoo Keeper and my experiences owning a stand-up arcade cabinet of the same.

Zoo Keeper is… well, I was going to start this article off by talking about what kind of game it is. “Arcade” is not really a genre. It is a containment action game split into three sections. In each you play the part of Zeke, the Zoo Keeper. In the stage that occupies most of your time with the game, you move in a rectangular motion around a zoo, creating layers of bricks as you move. Your animals are inside and will try to get out. When they decide to leave, they will eat away at layers of bricks in an attempt to do so. So you create more layers by moving around the zoo itself. If the animals touch you, you lose a life. You can jump to avoid their touch, but you will see that eventually so many animals will emerge from the zoo that trying to find a landing spot can be tricky. Oh, and when you jump you aren’t making bricks.

Each instance of this stage has a timer, your goal is to make it to the end of the timer, trapping as many animals inside as you can. There are four prizes on each level that come up at pre-determined time. One prize is a net. This acts as a sort of power-up. With the net – which you only have for a few seconds – you can touch the animals and send them back to the zoo. The net is usually, but not always, revealed toward the end of the level. So if a lot of animals have gotten out, this gives you a chance to trap ’em again before the end of the level.

At the end of the stage, the game counts the number of animals in the zoo and you get bonus points for how many you kept contained.

There are two other stages. It is difficult for me to understand why they needed them. The second stage has you jumping across platforms in an attempt to get to the top. His girlfriend, Zelda is up there, having been kidnapped by a monkey that throws coconuts at you, which bounce on the platforms. The final stage is a sort of platform escalator thing where you have to jump over animals running around in a pattern to get to the top. You do get an extra life every time you complete this stage, but both stages 2 and 3 have a thing going on where it gets worse for the player the longer you take.

The way, though, to get points in Zoo Keeper is to let a bunch of animals out in the first level and jump over them. The game kind of tells you this, but it doesn’t really go out of its way to talk about the multiplier for jumping over multiple animals. The animals will sort of run in a pack (although they all have different speeds). If you can judge a place along the zoo where they are all together and jump over them, you will get many tens and hundreds of thousands more points than anything else in the game. I have heard that the Harry Potter game Quidditch has a feature that awards astronomical points if you get a “Snitch” and in that regard, that is the same discovery to be had with Zoo Keeper. Jumping over the animals and letting them get out in the same direction and employing your strategy in the jumps should be your main goals.

Zoo Keeper was the first offbeat, obscure and slightly weird game I became aware of when I started to really get into the hobby of arcade games.

Do you get weird with it? With whatever “it” is? I think there are different stages of getting into a new interest. There is that wonder when everything is new. I like to connect with people and ask questions and immerse myself in whatever it is that I am learning about. You get to where you can have a conversation about it with people interested in it longer than you, and there is the jokes. Ohhh I love the jokes, I love looking at a new thing and seeing the incongruities and oddball things everyone just takes for granted, I love that with new, fresh eyes.

I bought one in 2007, one of the guys out in Colorado that everyone knows had one for sale. It was intriguing to have The Offbeat Game. I quickly discovered that it had a problem saving high scores, which is something that is a must for the games I own: if there is a kit that does it, I will get and install that kit. I was able to get one from a website called Quarter Arcade. They are still around – the kit required some soldering and I learned how pins are counted in an arcade circuit board. Essentially pin 1 is at the “top right” of a chip. You count down, then go across, then go back up, so “pin 20” – if the last one – is across from pin 1. I accidentally landed a glob of solder on a socket, melting it, but as it turns out the part of the socket I melted wasn’t needed for the high score kit! Divine intervention!

Years later, my wife and I took a trip to Belize for our honeymoon. I had two arcade games at her house, Zoo Keeper and Q*bert. We left the cats for a week and they managed to open the coin door and get inside Zoo Keeper. The original circuit boards never worked correctly again after that for me – I tried everything I knew how to do, I shipped them to a technician in Virginia, and he fixed a bunch of things and got them working on his Taito test bench. He sent them back, and … no dice.

Luckily, the creator jrok made a “ZooQ” board, which offers Zoo Keeper via FPGA and a few other games. That is what I went with for the rest of my time with the game.

I sold Zoo Keeper last month. My interests are changing a little bit. I bought a new car over the summer, and I wanted to be able to park it in the garage. Where I live, I have had possibly bears, maybe other forest friends scratch my car. We had a tree fall on my wife’s Jeep when parked outside a couple of years ago, crushing it. When you fill your garage up with games, trying to create some Willy Wonka experience, growing up doesn’t require the attempted murder of four children – it can be just wanting to keep some of your other stuff nice. So I sold Zoo Keeper (and Wizard of Wor and a small horizontal JAMMA cabaret machine). I felt a little melancholy about it. If I had limitless space, I’d have probably never sold an arcade game I’ve ever purchased, and I have owned 40 of them over 27 years. It’s a good game with gameplay that holds up, I will say that the way Taito did coin doors was infuriating. I have never seen one that still had the metal bar in back – you are sort of supposed to twist that bar and it expands in a way that stops the door from being opened. I haven’t had varmints get in my game, but I’ve had moths get in, and nothing I tried (short of trying to buy another metal bar contraption) worked for me in actually shutting the door. It was time. I sold the game to a local collector who is going to restore it – I gave him the side art I had, but never installed because it would have meant taking the screws off the sides of the game, which…. I didn’t feel confident I could put it all back together.

As I get older, I do wonder what will become of these arcade games I’ve acquired through now what is more than half of my life. I guess I have hopes of my family being able to sell them for money after I die, or if I get some indication that the end is near, I could do some work ahead of time. I had a great time with Zoo Keeper, over 20 years and my particular game seems to be in the hands of someone wanting to bring it to greater heights.