Since there's so many different petz games and spinoffs, not even taking into account the in name only games released after Petz 5, I decided to do a write-up of what features appeared where to clear up confusion (and hopefully stop people thinking things like "Horsez happened because PF Magic were running out of ideas"). Of note I'm a hexer, so a lot of this retrospective covers things like how the LNZ files have changed over time.
Technically there never really was a single game called "Petz 1". The original Petz game was called Dogz and came out in 1995. It was followed up by Catz in 1996. Unlike later instalments these were separate games and whilst they could both be installed on the same computer they did not interact with one another. In both games the user adopted only one pet at a time and there was a limited selection of toys. The graphics were also simpler and more cartoony than in later games, however they used the same ballz and linez animation style, as well as the expressive animations and lifelike AI, that would go on to define the series.
Each game came with five breeds. In Dogz these correspond to the Great Dane. Mutt, Scottie, Chihuahua and Bulldog, whilst in Catz they correspond to the Persian, Calico, Orange Shorthair, B+W Shorthair, and Siamese. However there were some differences, such as the "Bootz" breed being described as a setter.
On a personal level these were the first games I ever interacted with. My cousins had a copy of Dogz on their computer in the mid-90s, and I was fascinated from the start!
From a hexer's standpoint the original petz games had some interesting features. The LNZ files, instead of being buried inside a breedfile, were plain text files. This meant that anyone could edit them with a simple text editor such as Notepad. Another fascinating feature inside these LNZ files were the Default Factors, a section that allowed for easy editing of personality traits. In subsequent games these would be buried inside the breedfile code, and it wouldn't be until the early 2020s that they'd be deciphered. Less dramatically there was also a "speckle colour" feature, which was the only way to add texture to the pet since furfiles did not exist. The speckle column was retained in later games, although it doesn't appear to be functional in any of them.
Despite these features I'm not sure if there was ever a strong hexing community based around these games, and a lot of features that we now take for granted were missing. These included bitmap textures, paintballz and addballz, meaning there were stricter limitations on features such as markings or additional appendages. However there are still a few P1 hexies floating around. Carolyn's Creations has a selection of Dogz and Catz breeds for download, as well as some information on hexing in P1.
Carolyn's hexing info (scroll down to "Breed editing in Catz 1" and "Breed editing in Dogz 1")
Ive never played Oddballz much personally, and not when it was new, so there's not much I can say about this game. It was a Petz spinoff released in 1996 featuring a variety of creatures more like aliens or cartoon characters than anything else.
I've sometimes seen Oddballz referred to in the community as "Petz 1.5" and it is a fitting name. Oddballz is based on the Catz 1 engine and so the different creatures were technically modified catz. It also had the same external LNZ as the original games. However these LNZ files were full of extra features that never appeared in the original games. Most of these were specific to the Oddballz games, but textures and addballz debuted in this game and were used in all games going forwards. Textures allowed for more complicated markings, whilst addballz allowed for the creation of completely new features. Curiously, though, addballz were only used to create the emoticons that sometimes popped up over the creatures' heads, and other permanent features were made by modifying the existing ballz. This led to some strange creations, such as Jester's bells technically being its toes! It's possible that Oddballz may have been, in part, a testing ground for some of these new features, but I'm just speculating.
As an additional curiosity these seem to be the first games to use a Ballz Info section rather than having each ball attribute (colour, size etc) defined in a different section as was the case in Petz 1. Not the case for the Move section though, which is still split into up, down, and sideways. The Default Factors section is still present and as far as I'm aware functional.
The second generation of Petz games, released in 1997, made several overhauls that turned the series into something more recognisable. The graphics gained an overhaul, and the breeds were given their modern names. These were the Great Dane. Mutt, Scottie, Chihuahua and Bulldog for Dogz 2 and the Persian, Calico, Orange Shorthair, B+W Shorthair, and Siamese for Catz 2. This was the first game to allow the player to adopt more than one pet, to have two petz out at once, and to combine the Catz and Dogz games if both were installed together. Petz could not only learn or have favourite foods or toys, but form enduring friendships or rivalries with other petz.
Later on in the year some DLC content came out. As well as extra toys, this included the remaining original Petz breeds - the Tabby, Maine Coon, Chinchilla Persian and Alley Cat for Catz, and the Dalmatian, Labrador, Poodle, Sheepdog and Dachshund for Dogz. It's notable that some of these breeds, such as the dalmatian and poodle, are more complicated designs.
At this point the game engine becomes more familiar. The LNZ files are no longer external but hidden inside the .cat or .dog breedfiles. This seems to be the first game to include paintballz, used for pawpads and other markings. Funnily enough, whilst the game did not include clothing, some of the breeds did have features such as bows and shirts - except these were technically part of their bodies.
Unusually, some of the breedfiles still contain the Default Scales section, although it doesn't appear to have any function. Presumably the personality data is stored elsewhere inside the file, though it does not appear to be in the same format as later games. Other than that the LNZ files for P2 breeds would look familiar to a hexer, except for sections such as Fur Colour Areas that control inheritance - these would of course not be needed as there was no breeding in these games.
Just to be extra confusing, "Dogz 2" and "Catz 2" can also refer to a pair of the Ubisoft Petz titles released in 2007. Unlike the regular Petz games these had RPG elements and a storyline. As with the other "Ubi-Petz" games these are not considered to be part of the original Petz series, although they do seem to be some of the more well-received titles from that era.
Released in 1998, this was probably the biggest step forward for the series. Petz 3 added in a number of extra features such as clothing, yet more toys, all ten prior breeds, and playscenes (previously the petz could only roam the desktop or playpen window), but the biggest of all was breeding. Prior to this petz could be adopted as puppies or kittens and slowly grow up, but this was mostly cosmetic. Breeding allowed for a whole new dimension of gameplay as players could mix and match breeds and even create their own selective lineages.
There was some DLC for these games, though mostly in the form of toys and clothes. It seems that the Pig and Bunny files might have been intended to be DLC breeds, but they then appeared in Petz 4 instead.
It's at this point also that the LNZ files have the same set of features as they would going forward.
This is the oldest petz game that most modern players still play, thanks to the almost full set of features and the fact that, unlike older instalments, it is still relatively easy to get working on modern systems.
This was the last Petz game to be developed by PF Magic before the sale to Ubisoft. Compared to previous releases it did not seem to add as many new features, and was mostly the same as Petz 3 gameplay-wise.
Petz 4 introduced two new "breeds" - the pig (Dogz) and bunny (Catz). These were the only official breeds to not be dogs or cats, although they could not breed to reflect the fact that they were different species. There were also several new playscenes. Unlike the P3 playscenes, which were based around things like everyday rooms or settings such as the beach, the P4 playscenes all had a travel or exotic theme, such Arabia, a tropical island, the Wild West, or the circus. These scenes also included host characters that could appear and interact with any petz the player had out. There were also the usual by now extra toys and clothing items, and a playscene editor that let users create their own settings.
The last new feature the games came with was voice recognition, and if I'm recalling right they originally shipped with a small microphone. The idea was that you could command your petz by speaking to them and that they would learn things like names for toys, or commands like "sit" or "come here". In practice I could never get it to work. Perhaps it couldn't recognise a northern accent.
From my recollection, the Petz 4 games were less well received than the ones before as they didn't do much to innovate on the core gameplay, and the older, more established fans considered the new features they did contain to be too childish. However it is probably the most commonly played version of the game nowadays, probably because it was easier during the 00s and 2010s to find installers for it online.
I'm including this for completion's sake, although I never played it, in case someone's wondering "was Babyz like Petz?" or similar. Babyz was another spinoff game, similar to Oddballz in that it used a variation of the Petz game engine (specifically the P4 engine). It came out in 1999. Despite using a variation of the P4 engine it was not compatible with the Petz games, so it wasn't possible for players to have babyz and petz interact, although sometimes the P4 bunny would appear.
Like Petz it used the ballz and linez system of graphics, meaning that it too has a dedicated fanbase of hexers that are still around today. There's not much I can say personally about these games or their fanbase beyond that, but there were some interesting features such as the reuse of the addgroup column in the addballz (previously only used in Oddballz) to make the babyz look like they were crying when they became upset. There was also a new LNZ feature, the polygon, which sadly never made it back into the Petz games.
Somewhere between 1999 and 2002 PF Magic was brought out by Ubisoft, including the rights to and the code for the Petz series. When Petz 5 came out in 2002, it was the first game to not be made by PF Magic.
Petz 5 included a number of new features, the most well-received of these being litters. Previously a female pet would have only one baby at a time, but now she could have anything from one to four. The game also included ten new breeds, five dogs and five cats. These were the German Shepherd, Jack Russel, Golden Retriever, Papillion and Pug for Dogz, and the Scottish Fold, Desert Lynx, Honey Bear, Japanese Bobtail and Egyptian Mau for Catz. These were not so well received as they were glitchier than the original breeds and often failed to breed true, probably because they were made by people with little or no experience of how the game worked. Strangely enough one of these breeds, the Jack Russel, appears to have originated in Petz 4 as one of the circus playscene hosts has a similar appearance, although her LNZ file identifies her as a dachshund.
As before there were a number of new playscenes, toys, and clothing, but with a twist - not all the toys were available to begin with and had to be earned by playing minigames, which were hosted in the new playscenes. These included an obstacle course and a game of rock-paper-scissors. An interesting concept (especially the obstacle course, which was the closest to an agility course the games ever came up with) but they didn't always work so well in practice. There were also some weather effects such as rain and a night/day cycle, which were mostly cosmetic but added a bit of visual interest.
Petz 5 had limited backwards compatibility compared to the previous games. In all games it was possible to bring a pet forward from an older game to a newer one, but also in many cases to play with a pet from a newer game in an older. However whilst it was possible to import a pet into P5 they couldn't be returned to older versions. This caused some trouble for the community with adoptions as whilst a pet adopted in P4 could be played with in P3, a pet adopted in P5 could only be played in that game. Because of this, while some features such as litters were well-received, Petz 5 isn't as widely played as it could have been otherwise. However it's still commonly played, and in recent years the tool PetzFlux has removed the backwards compatibility limitation.
I know what you're thinking. "Those aren't Petz!" But the point of this page is to discuss the different versions and spin-offs of Petz, and to dispel any confusion between games, so they get a mention.
Anyway following the release of Petz 5 Ubisoft continued to put out games under the Petz name, but none of them had anything in common with the previous titles aside from being pet simulators. None of them used the same engine as previous games, including the ballz and linez graphics, and there was no backwards compatibility - these were straight up in-name-only instalments. Some are retitled and translated pet simulators from Japan that never originated as Petz titles, others seem to be Nintendogs clones or simple RPGs. You'll often see these games referred to as "Ubi-Petz". If you've hear of games like "Horsez", "Hamsterz" or any other animal with a Z, it's probably one of these games (not of course to be confused with hexed breeds for previous games). As a quick rule, the cover art has a photo of the animal rather than a cartoon drawing, you're looking at a Ubi-Petz game. Unfortunately this led to the Petz series gaining a reputation for being cheap shovelware, rather than the surprisingly deep and complex games they used to be.
Needless to say these games are highly unpopular in the Petz community, though some (such as the previously mentioned "Dogz 2" and "Catz 2") have a better reception than others.
