Zoo Keeper (1983 video game)

Did You Know?

• Zoo Keeper was re-released in the 2005 Taito Legends collection for PlayStation 2, Xbox, and Windows.
• The game's main character, Zeke, later appeared in a family-friendly version of Taito's mechanical game Ice Cold Beer called Zeke's Peak.
• In Zeke's Peak, Zeke is a mountain climber instead of a zookeeper.

Gameplay

In Zoo Keeper, three stage types cycle in a set order. The first type has Zeke moving along the edges of a rectangular pen. As he goes, a brick wall rises beneath him. Inside the pen, animals bounce around and create holes in the wall when they hit it. If an animal gets through a hole, it runs along the outer edge where Zeke is. This stage is timed, and bonus items appear at fixed moments. One such item is a net, which lets Zeke scoop up animals and return them to a cage in the center of the screen for a few seconds. Later zoo stages offer multiple nets. When the timer runs out, points are given for each animal still inside the wall. Jumping over animals earns points, and the value increases exponentially for jumping over several at once, with no cap—a single jump can yield 1,000,000 points. Every second zoo stage is followed by a platform stage. Here, Zeke must hop across horizontally moving platforms to reach a platform at the top center, where Zelda is tied to a tree. Some platforms hold bonus items, and a monkey tosses coconuts that bounce between platforms and must be dodged. After each platform stage except the first, a bonus stage appears. This stage has several escalators, each with a cage in front. Zeke must cross the screen to reach each escalator, leaping over both the animals running toward him and the cage. Reaching Zelda at the top of the last escalator grants an extra life. The first bonus stage has two escalators, the second has three, and all later ones have four. Zeke loses a life if he touches an animal without holding a net. In platform stages, a life is lost if a coconut hits him or he falls off the bottom of the screen. The game ends when all lives are gone.

Development

Keith Egging originally designed a game where a crab interacted with eggs and the tadpoles that hatched from them. Programmer John Morgan made major changes during development, moving the game far from that early idea. Morgan later explained that the art was created in a specific way. In later stages, the ledges on a platform level become invisible, which Morgan acknowledged as a bug. Since the ledges always follow the same pattern, the level remains beatable, so he chose to leave the glitch as is.