Listen. PF Magicâs Petz is the virtual pet game for anyone who wants a low-stress, fun, open-ended, Blorbo From Your Floor simulator.
Abandonware, so itâs easily found as a free download and itâs technically not even piracy! Even if it was, pirating from Ubisoft is always morally correct. Download the installers here, or a pre-installed copy of Petz 4 with a modern compatibility+quality-of-life mod here.
Unlike many other games (such as Animal Crossing, or browser-based pet games), your petz and the world they live in will not suffer on days you donât open the game. Petz will only gain neglect if you refuse to play with them on a day where you have booted up the game - a âlaunch day.â Feel free to take a hiatus, because your petz and their little world will be right where you left them when you feel like returning to the game.
Also, petz donât die. They literally ran a poll in 1997 asking players if they wanted petz to die like Tamagotchi do, and the players said no. Petz will ârun awayâ if severely mistreated, leaving the game, but old age will not destroy your petz.
One of the most in-depth personality systems in any virtual pet game, with multiple factors determining a petâs temperament, animations, likes and dislikes, and relationships. Discover your petâs personality through gameplay, find its favorite foods, and watch it form friendships and rivalries with other pets! The petz constantly learn from new experiences, and training can reinforce far more than just tricks and good behavior.
A robust genetics system that allows for truly unique pets to be bred via breed trait mixing and mutations. âSelective breedsâ are a common self-imposed challenge in the petz community.
Extremely lightweight! You can easily hold an entire petz game on a flash drive, and still have a huge amount of space left for other things. This thing was designed to run on slow, old computersâŠ. by 1990âČs standards.
Ease of sharing - individual petz are stored as .pet files, which were intentionally designed to be easily shared over email and website services on dial-up internet. Nowadays, you can even share them via Discord. Every .pet file contains that individual petâs appearance, personality, and memories, and updates every time itâs played with. Sending petz on âplaydatesâ to other peopleâs games via this file-sharing has existed for a long time, and now petz players even stream these playdates on Twitch sometimes!
A very active modding community, with community-made tools designed to assist modders. Want a sparkledog, a dragon, or a pokemon? Modders have, and continue to, create petz like this beyond what the vanilla game offers.
Also? Petz fansites are like a glimpse into a world where social media didnât kill the Personal Website as a concept. The sites in the neocities Petz Community Webring are just a handful of the petz sites that exist out here. Shoutout to the neocities-hosted ones - many of them are hand coded, with layouts reminiscent of the best of classic 2000âČs web design, while taking advantage of modern HTML and CSS features. Even if you donât want to play Petz, I recommend looking at petz fansites. Theyâre just as much art as the mods are.
