Petz Life

starting a little discussion here -
i first acquired petz when i was around 4 years old. my mom bought me the "games for girls" multipack from sam's club that included CATZ 3, a game called pet shop, and a 3rd game i can't remember but it MIGHT have been barbie horse adventure? if anyone remembers what the 3rd game was let me know...

i couldn't read when i started playing petz, so i had billions of petz all named key smashes or the default name. i adopted so many petz until the game wouldn't open on the family windows 98 PC. after that, my mom bought me dogz 4, and i took hundreds of fish bowls out of the toy closet until once again the game wouldn't even open.
once i was 6, i obtained catz 5 and figured out how to fix the game when i broke it and also how to read...i found carolyn's creations when i searched "catz 5" on the cool new website known as google. i downloaded every breed i could find hungrily, but didn't understand how to put them in my game for MONTHS but i would be on the computer for hours trying to figure it out almost everyday. i don't know how i managed to work out that they went in resource/catz but when i did, THINGS. CHANGED. FOR. ME.

My mom bought petz 5 for me from a thrift store because she needed reprieve from my humongous games addiction. If she heard "welcome to the zoo zoo zoo with the kanga-roos roos roos and the tigers too too too WELCOME TO THE ZOO ZOO ZOO!!" one more time she was gonna kill me I think.

I don't remember how old I was, but I do know I had it by time I was in 5th grade. I had a slumber party that year and everyone spent the night breeding horrific abominations with petzA. I remember the day after they all went home I was SO upset by how many uggos were in my game and spent the morning purging my game.

That is adorable @mazzew. I spent so much time breeding ugos myself @Hash I'm not sure I would even notice if someone came and did that.

My, then best friend now wife, has always been really into games and her dad was always getting new games for her brother and her. There was some sleep over in 5th grade. i spent very little time on the computer for a variety of reasons. So being given access and time to play on the computer was amazing to me. And she happened to have Petz 5. I adopted a mutt and a GSD named Sweaty(I could not spell. I meant to spell Sweety but....) and Max. I raised them at house whenever I went over. They had 1 pup, little black GSD shaped with mutt white spots, before a computer wipe. We discovered VPZ together. We bred monstrosities, many of who we ended up neglecting until they ran away.

I harassed my mom for the game for a while. I eventually got it and P4. I had them installed onto a flash drive so I could take them back and forth between my mom's and Dad's place. I introduced my cousin who had a great dane and chihuahua named Bootz and Pickles. We became obsessed to the point one of our games at our grandmother's, who did not have a computer, was to have our petz as our working dogz and barn catz at her house. We played a lot of pretend there.

I don't know if I've ever not had petz installed on my computer(or that little long lost flash drive) since I got the game myself

Petz did get blamed for any virus that got on the family computer. It wasn't the music pirating or the adult sites my step-dad visited. It was completely the fault of my pixle animals....funny how after I got my computer the family computer continued getting viruses but mine didn't....

I had a friend in grade school that had petz. We played when I went to her house, I was ENTRANCED. I think I eventually was allowed to get P5 around the time it came out, but it didn't hold the same sway over me (I got into horses and horse games around that time). I think I dabbled VERY lightly with the game and user-made breedz when I was in my late teens or early twenties, but that was a chaotic time in my life. So now I am REALLY excited to be back into it because its both nostalgia-overload and I'm discovering so many new things!! Best of both worlds to be sure!!

@Shade@NSP Omg I didn't know it was your wife that got you into Petz! That's so cute.

Whenever my sister and I would go to grandma's house, it was really really boring. So we'd hang out with the neighbor who was our age. My sister and I weren't allowed to bring our video games to grandma's house (so we were just bored all day hahaha). The neighbor girl had sooo many pets/animals that she raised and took care of (including real life dog/cat litters) and she wasn't into computer/video games like my sister and I, but she did have Dogz 3!! I remember she had a Dalmatian!! And she warned me about like, you can't adopt too many and a few other tips I can't remember? She really didn't have Internet at her house (we were kind of in a weird vortex of no Internet or video games when I went to grandma's house haha), so a lot of our learning was just from reading the tips and talking about our experiences.

I didn't really hang out with her much after this..... honestly if given the choice between staying home because we were old enough to be alone and staying at grandma's, I chose the former.

I don't remember much after that, but I must've been bugging my mom about the game because the next holiday, my parents gifted my sister Catz 4 and me Dogz 4.

I was like a military child or something because the way I played Dogz was strict-- I had to open the game, feed each pet individually, and then one-on-one training to teach each pet some tricks (I didn't know how these worked) and train them in calling and hoop. Eventually they fell in love and had babies and I got overwhelmed with how I was playing the game.

My sister had her own copy on her own account because she had Catz and her stuff could be opened intendent of my dogz?? For some reason we never had them together!

I had a friend in middle school who also had Petz. And we shared Word documents with pictures with each other.

Eventually we found Carolyn's Creations-- I don't even know how. And my sister was obsessed with all the non-catz breeds and downloaded the Honker and Pegasus and Spinosaurus and I don't remember if she even had any actual cat catz. I downloaded the toyz and clothes I remember. Hers was the only site I remember ever visiting to download petz because I trusted her to not give me a virus!

I downloaded every single breed and kept them all in folders and then I never used ANY of them hahaha I wanted to eventually adopt and take care of every single OB dog breed (because I was a military kid and everything had to be organized). But, I got overwhelmed. I learned about foldering petz tho? I feel like I had to eventually folder the older petz and focus on the generations. I honestly can't remember my earliest petzing days.

I didn't have PetzA EVER. I know that. And I never cheated by making my clock go forwards in time (I wasn't smart enough to think to do that)

Then at some point my parents got me Babyz??? I can't even remember why or how but I remember playing it and getting really overwhelmed with how much they cried and I talked to them with my microphone. I remember my mom commenting on how weird the Babyz game was and asked if it made me want to have kids (because I had already announced to my parents in middle school that I knew I wasn't gonna have real kids of my own).

Anyway, when I got into AIM and MSN, I stopped playing Petz so I never talked to anyone from the community.
I never did adopt any catz into my family...
Lost all my dogz. But I think they might be backed up to a Floppy somehwere....
I still have all of Carolyn's breeds I downloaded from backups but I don't have the Adopted Petz folders

I can barely remember how I got into Petz as a kid. I would have been too young to play Petz 4 at the time it came out, so I'm guessing I discovered it a few years after. My sister and I were friends with this pair of sisters whose house we would play it at, down on their basement computer (why was every computer in the basement in the early oughts? That's where my family computer was too for the longest time too ).

I must have been quite young though, because my memories are super conflated. I think I remember a skating rink birthday party (probably my sister's) where she received a copy of Dogz 4 (no catz) as a birthday gift, perhaps from those sisters. I think I was always more into it than my her, though. We played "together" (both sitting at the computer while one person - probably me - controlled the game), but I think I went on to continue playing it by myself when she lost interest. I remember really liking poodles as a kid, but as others have said, I was in the habit breeding anything and everything together and creating total mutts (and how I wished we could breed the pigs!). It was always so unsatisfying when an offspring looked too much like either of its parents...

I was not on the internet as a child (I was told we paid by minute for dial up, but I'm not sure if that's really how it worked or if that's just what my mother said to keep me off of it), so I didn't realize there was an online petz community until I was an adult. So my gameplay was very, very vanilla. I remember being so frustrated that it would take days for a puppy to be born! And if you forgot to check in on your game for a day? Ugh!

I got back into it as an adult because I had a dream about the game. I woke up and thought, "I should see if I can find a copy of it anywhere on the internet," fully expecting it to be long gone. Lo and behold...

Szmantha wrote: ↑Sun Mar 17, 2024 4:07 pmI was not on the internet as a child (I was told we paid by minute for dial up, but I'm not sure if that's really how it worked or if that's just what my mother said to keep me off of it), so I didn't realize there was an online petz community until I was an adult. So my gameplay was very, very vanilla. I remember being so frustrated that it would take days for a puppy to be born! And if you forgot to check in on your game for a day? Ugh!

OMG we had the same experience... I was on Dial Up until I was 15 years old!!! I also loved the breeding and seeing what petz babies they'd have-- my petz were ALWAYS pregnant haha

You must be younger than me tho because I had Dogz 4 and Babyz when I was like 11 or 12 years old. Then I got Dogz 5 (and my sister got Catz 5) when I was 13 or 14? It was right before I started high school and then I got kind of bored with the games.

Szmantha wrote: ↑Sun Mar 17, 2024 4:07 pmI got back into it as an adult because I had a dream about the game. I woke up and thought, "I should see if I can find a copy of it anywhere on the internet," fully expecting it to be long gone. Lo and behold...

Also same! I wanted a cute little pet simulation game in 2018 and couldn't find one so I was like "I wonder if I can get this really old Petz game I used to play to work on my computer" And I was kind of shocked there was a whole community around the games still!

Omg you guys have such cool origin stories. It's so funny some people started the game with PetzA being an option already.

I remember playing Petz 3 at my bffs house and then my parents got it for me too. I would spend lots of time reading my Official Pokedex by Tiger Electeonics while waiting for my petz to breed lol.

Celia wrote: ↑Mon Mar 18, 2024 5:04 pm Omg you guys have such cool origin stories. It's so funny some people started the game with PetzA being an option already.

I remember playing Petz 3 at my bffs house and then my parents got it for me too. I would spend lots of time reading my Official Pokedex by Tiger Electeonics while waiting for my petz to breed lol.

I did that too! Except I was reading the book, I always killed the battery in my electronic one. I had the one for the first gen and Johto. I had the first gen memorized.

I actually found petz because I was looking up cyber pet adoptions, those little gifs that you would "Adopt" and put on your website with cute little gif accessories and certificates. A website had a Catz I cat on it and my mind was BLOWN when I realized that it was a computer game! I told my Dad about it and he bought it for my sister and I for Christmas that year. So December 1996, Tips was born. I still have her to this day.