The Zoo Race begins with a librarian dreaming that her friends have been transformed into animals after the flood of Noah. It then puts those animals on race tracks containing glass mazes, piranhas, fire geysers, exploding barrels, rockets, cannons and bomber planes. This is not a sentence I expected to write today.
The game was created by Randall Alaimo, who is credited with lead programming, level design, modeling, songwriting, video, website programming and production. Other contributors supplied animal models, animation, voices and music. The complete PC version is offered free from the site.
Mechanically, the page is far more specific than most old game descriptions. Arrow keys move the animal, Control jumps and the space bar honks. Different animals have different advantages: horses and cougars jump well but dislike water; rhinoceroses and bears can smash through many obstacles; pigs and sheep are strong swimmers. Food gives speed boosts. Crow droppings do not.
That last point is not editorial embellishment. The instructions explicitly warn players not to confuse food with crow poop because eating it produces a speed penalty.
The site also has an unusually complete original soundtrack. Songs are assigned to characters such as Hannah the Horse, Bethany the Bear and Cain the Cougar, with vocals and guitar credited individually. The lyrics are explicitly Christian, and the site connects the game to Alaimo’s own religious testimony and later projects.
What makes Zoo Race worth documenting is not that it represents a major turning point in game history. It doesn’t need to. It represents something the independent Web was extremely good at enabling: one person with enough determination could build a game, record a soundtrack, explain the controls, host the download, write the mythology and maintain the entire surrounding world without asking whether an audience-development team had approved the concept.
A modern storefront would probably reduce all of this to screenshots, system requirements and a review score. The original site gives you the creator’s whole thought process, including the parts no product manager would have allowed through the meeting.
That is exactly the sort of thing CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list keeps uncovering: not always important, but unmistakably made by somebody.