Fandom Promo
In your own space, create a promo and/or rec list for someone new to a fandom.
I think this is going to be one of those where I cave, just a little, because I feel like I've already pushed out as much as I can for the old style creature scene. Go look at previous entries for that. Instead I'll make an effort to sort of stay in the spirit of the challenge, although I have no idea how to write a "canon manifesto" and it's not like there's really a canon anyway, but let's go back to my roots, to one of the few things I could ever call "a fandom" - but definitely not the fanfic and meta sort. In fact, it doesn't even call itself a fandom, because it grew up from a completely parallel tradition to Fandom. Let me talk some more about Petz:
I specifically want to focus on this because it's a foundational series for me, but also because there seemed to be some misconceptions when I posted Petz stuff earlier that it was some sort of pixel artwork. It's not, but explaining it's a virtual pet game probably puts people in mind of Tamagotchi or Neopets - simple animations or totally static images. The things that most people imagine when you say "90s-00s pet sim". Petz are not that at all. They are real time, responsive, animated desktop creatures:
Dogz Version 1.1 Playthrough (Youtube) - scroll to about seven minutes in to see some core gameplay.
That's the oldest version of the game. It came out in 1995, and you can see how the creatures moved around, reacted to items and the cursor, and acted like real animals and not just a few prebaked animations. Let that sink in.
The Petz brand has since changed hands a few times so you might have seen a game called "Petz" or similar that looks nothing like that. For this post we're looking at the core series from 1995 - 2002. First, here's a history lesson to clear up exactly what I mean by Petz, plus a couple of spinoff series that you might know of (Oddballz, Babyz).
Well that's all well and good, but why should you care about a thirty year old game? First of all, it's still playable, and I have some links to guides on how to get it working on a modern system here. Second, it's aged well, the style of cartoony graphics doesn't look anywhere near as dated as true 3D from the same era. Third, it's cute, relaxing, and crucially if you're low on time or energy, doesn't force you to play every day to maintain your pets. Time only passes when the game is open.
But the real reason why you should play this game is that it isn't really a cute cat and dog sim. It's a gateway to a whole world of website creation, modding, and creature design sandboxes. None of this was intentional on the devs' part, but with a little modding know-how you can go from this:
to this:
(Breedfile I made of a Woodcrafter, from Serina. I warned you Petz was a creature gateway.)
Petz being the weird little community it is that grew up apart from any major game or media fandom, modding is called "hexing" because it was originally done in hex editors. There are much easier to use tools now, but the name stuck from those days and isn't going anywhere.
The reason for this versatility is the pseudo-3D graphics system, in which the creatures are rendered as a collection of spheres. With the right tools you can move them around, recolor or retexture them, remove them, or add new ones. If the devs had used typical 3D, Petz would probably have sunk without trace. As it is, they unintentionally gave players a whole artform to experiment with, and people still make, share, and trade hexes today.
And where do you do that? WEBSITES! Fitting for an old game, Petz seems to be unique in that its community still focuses heavily on handmade static HTML sites. My personal theory is because hexed breedfiles had to be hosted somewhere, it wasn't as easy to migrate to social media as a text or image based community. When you look at the petz community, you look at a snapshot of the old internet. There are petz Tumblrs and Petz Discords and all, but they haven't taken over the website based community, where you can have fun exploring. For some starter points:
- my own Petz link page
- sites tagged "petz" on Neocities
But of course I'm focusing on hexing because that's what I do. There's whole other aspects of the community too - breeding, showing, a whole sub-community based around horse breedfiles if you're a Horse Person... but for me it was always about turning it into a way to have various figments of the imagination run around on a desktop where you can pet them and play fetch.
So there you have it. I think it says a lot about me that the closest things I have to "fandoms" are sandboxes that feel more like creative toys than preset storylines. Even after all this time, Petz still fits a niche like nothing else.