Putt-Putt Saves the Zoo

Putt-Putt Saves the Zoo
Developer: Humongous Entertainment Publisher: Humongous Entertainment Platforms: Windows, Mac OS Classic Released in US: 1995 This game has hidden development-related text. This game has unused graphics. This game has unused cinematics. This game has unused music. This game has unused sounds. This game has unused text. This game has debugging material. This game has revisional differences. This game has a prototype article This game has a prerelease article

This page is loooong... Consider grouping related content into additional subpages to ease readability.

In his third outing, Putt-Putt Saves the Zoo (spoiler alert!). He also gets caught up in some bizarre developer in-jokes, has his driver's license set to expire in late 1999, and hurls from eating too much cotton candy. And as if that wasn't enough, there's a demo version with even weirder stuff.

Ahh, the glory days of the multimedia era...

Sub-Pages

Prototype Info

Prerelease Info

Debug Mode

Debug options

Like most Humongous games, this one has a debug mode, activated by adding the line SuperCool=71595 to the hegames.ini configuration file. This adds two buttons to the front of Baldini's Grocery Store: "CLICK HERE TO PICK UP EVERYTHING!", which puts all plot-necessary items in the inventory, and "CLICK FOR ENDGAME", which triggers the ending sequence.

(Source: ScummVM Wiki)

Ice Hockey Debug Keys

Adding the line I♥Porkdude=71595 (note that the second character has to be 0x03 in order for it to work) to hegames.ini enables the following debug keys in the Ice Hockey game:

Key	Function
4	Gives goal score of 4 to both players
9	Gives game score of 9 to both players
C	Hide the cursor
Shift+C	Show the cursor
K	Hide the polar bear
Shift+K	Show the polar bear
F	Faster puck
Shift+F	Slower puck
G	Changes the size of the goals
I	Disable unknown
Shift+I	Enable unknown
T	Changes the direction of the puck

Hidden Scenes

A guide for aspiring managers to why you should keep a tight leash on your devteam.

HolyMoley

Add HolyMoley=71595 to hegames.ini and click on the gopher hole in the Grasslands (it's the tuft of grass in front of the lions). Presumably excised for religious content, as mild as it is.

IAmTheMoose

Add IAmTheMoose=71595 to hegames.ini, click on either of the joke-telling toucans in Jungle Land, and prepare for the most thrilling two minutes of your life.

MoveInHerds

Add MoveInHerds=71595 to hegames.ini and click on the observation point in the grasslands. This is a reference to a line from Jurassic Park; the second half of the line is present, but unused.

UpChuck

Add UpChuck=71595 to hegames.ini and get cotton candy from Chuck Wagon ten times to see the logical - and quite disgusting - outcome.

(Source: ScummVM Wiki)

Graphics

This game has a large number of unused graphics, mostly uncolored lineart and pencil sketches.

Demo Leftovers

These graphics are left over from the demo version, which is mostly present in the game data.

Zoo Entrance

This room's background has a copy of two of the dancing flowers hidden behind the dashboard.

Rough draft for part of the "Welcome to the Zoo" sequence. The numbers in the first frame indicate the internal frame order needed to produce the animation, with the "cycle" label marking the loop point for the first part of the sequence.

Rough animation of the topiary creatures gyratin'.

Outback Al

Uncolored animation of Outback Al pulling out the list of missing animals...

...blinking...

...and putting it back.

Chuck Wagon

Sketches of Putt-Putt's Cheese Squigglies-eating animation.

Little Skeeter

This storyboard sequence depicts the polar bear snowball fight clickpoint.

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  Near bear throws a snowball

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  Far bear ducks

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  Far bear throws his own snowball!

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  Near bear ducks

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  Near bear blows a raspberry...

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  ...and gets smacked in the face!

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  Far bear laughs

Pencil sketch of Little Skeeter.

Sketch of Putt-Putt talking to Little Skeeter.

Penguins

Here's an interesting one: the penguins were originally supposed to have their own fact-blabbering info kiosk! It's present in the room background, as shown, but the game covers it up by placing another graphic on top of the associated object. Only the kiosk itself is hidden, leaving behind an out-of-place shadow.

It has a complete animation set and a soundbyte for Putt-Putt to say when it's clicked (see here), but sadly no facts about penguins - just the placeholder subtitle "Blah blah blah...". What's there can be made to work by running local script 204, which is most easily accomplished using ScummVM's debugger.

The kiosk is actually visible in the room's save/load pictures, indicating it was removed fairly late in development.

Baby Jambo

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Sketches of the giant scary mousey terrorizing Baby Jambo.

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Full-size sketches of the Baby Jambo close-ups.

Uncolored lineart of Putt-Putt seeing what you did there blinking.

Jungle Land Entrance

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Storyboard sketches of what seems to be an unrealized clickpoint involving the monkey that sits on a vine getting knocked off his perch by another monkey, then narrowly escaping from the alligator below.

Raft

More uncolored lineart of Putt-Putt.

What seems to be a sketch of a frog, probably for the lilypad clickpoint.

Mr. Hippo

Still more sketches of Putt-Putt.

Thwack and Quack

A couple of work-in-progress versions of the "SCENIC VIEW" sign are hidden behind the dashboard. Note that the hidden text is slightly rougher than what's on the sign.

A sketch from a storyboard sequence for an old version of the Thwack and Quack clickpoint. This is the only frame left in the final, but the full thing made it into the demo version.

Scenic View

Partially-colored animation of Putt-Putt tossing the rope to Kenya...

...and Kenya catching it.

Leftover telescope pictures from the demo, which kept the dashboard visible at all times. The used images lack the placeholder at the bottom of the screen.

What would a Humongous Entertainment game be without some wild developer jokes? Obviously this was meant to be shown through the telescope, though it's probably a fairly old leftover due to using a different image format from the real telescope pictures.

For whatever reason, this frame is duplicated and stored separately.

Miscellaneous

Placeholder save/load image for unknown rooms. Similar images exist in most Humongous games.

Although all the necessary graphics are present, it's impossible to take a picture of Mr. Baldini in the initial release of the game: he's always in his store unless being talked to, and using the camera on the store door does nothing. The 1999 re-release fixes this.

Putt-Putt's primary animations (moving, talking, etc.) from Putt-Putt Joins the Parade and Putt-Putt Goes to the Moon are also present in this game, probably for testing purposes. The color remap chunks used to color them correctly in those games are no longer present, so their palette is broken. The basic logic for assembling and displaying the animations is still present, and the game will default to them if the Putt-Putt actor is spawned in a room with no costumes defined for it (for example, by forcing a warp to room 21, the Animal Tag room).

Adding ICanDrive=71595 to hegames.ini causes this image of Putt-Putt's driver's license to appear as the second-to-last picture in the credits.

(Source: ScummVM Wiki)

Unused Music

Background Music

Track	Notes
	A generic Jungle Land drumbeat. This track is called "Those Incessant Drums - Polynesian (Jungle Land)".
	A generic track without obvious use.
	Instrumental version of the Rhymin' Gibbons' backing track. Also features an unused uptempo version.
	Extended, melody-less version of one of the Arcticland themes. This track is called "Those Incessant Drums - Arctic Atmosphere".
	Located alongside the penguin bop beats, but it never plays. This track is called "Penguin Jam 4 (Boombox)".
	The save/load music from Freddi Fish and the Case of the Missing Kelp Seeds, stored with the save/load screen sound effects in this game. Likely just a leftover.

Most of these tracks were released on Bandcamp. Volume 1 was released on September 26, 2020, followed by Volume 2 and Volume 3 on October 9, 2020.

The Rhymin' Gibbons

The gibbons in Jungle Land normally pick from a selection of 27 rhymes, but five more (somehow even sillier than the rest) can be enabled by adding Gibbon=71595 to hegames.ini.

Track	Lyrics
	"How 'bout Fatty?" "Fatty? Uh, okay, okay. I saw a fatty I think it was your daddy Uh, uh, uh, it was your pappy? Fatty!"
	"Okay ... hair! Beautiful hair!" "Ooh, I got it! Here it is. To bake a cake he stands on a chair And he's covered with hair And his name is Fatty Bear. He gave me hair!"
	"Hey, what about Mickey?" "Mickey ..." "Hey hey, I got it! There was a monkey named Mickey He was kinda sticky If you ask me, I think he is pretty icky. Mickey!"
	"What about cobra?" "Oh, that's like snake. I got it. I can do it. The cobra Went on Oprah And she couldn't be much sobrah ..." "What're you talkin' about?" "Oh, I don't know. Cobra!"
	"Hey, how 'bout ... yeah, moose!" "Uh, moose? All right. There was a moose Feeling kinda loose He went and ate a bagoose! Ha, can you believe it? Moose!"

(Source: ScummVM Wiki)

Dialogue

Demo Leftovers

Some self-explanatory dialogue from the demo.

File	Subtitles
	Hi, I'm Putt-Putt!
	I'm back again in a brand new adventure.
	Some of the baby animals are missing from the new Cartown Zoo...
	...and we need to help find them.
	I can't show you the whole zoo yet because this is only the demo...
	So let's go see if we can rescue Kenya the Lion Cub.
	Come on!
	I'm ready to go!
	In the real game we'd learn all about hippos here.
	I can't shoot the rapids in the demo.
	Since this is just a demo, I'd better not go in.
	In the real game you can help me rescue all the baby animals.
	I can't wait.
	Bye bye, for now.

Jokes

File	Subtitles	Notes
	Welcome, sports fans, to the Arctic Land Fatty Bear Memorial Stadium.	As if the game didn't already take enough swipes at Fatty Bear, here's one more. The used lines refer to the stadium as the "Arctic Land Ice Arena" and "Arctic Land Icy Square Gardens".
	They do move in herds...	The second half of the Jurassic Park quote from MoveInHerds. This part isn't used, for whatever reason.

Other

File	Subtitles	Notes
	Great! Now we can find out all about penguins!	Would have been used for the penguin info kiosk.
	I already took a picture of Mr. Baldini.	As mentioned, it's impossible to take Mr. Baldini's photo in the original release.

Text

Subtitles

From this game onwards, Humongous titles removed the in-game option to turn on subtitles. The subtitles themselves are still present, though, and can be enabled by adding TextOn=1 to hegames.ini. This also works in most future games.

Since most people would never see the subtitles, the developers apparently stopped bothering to proofread them or keep them updated with later revisions to the script, resulting in frequent typos and occasional disparities between subtitles and dialogue.

(Source: ScummVM Wiki)

Error Handlers and Unused Text

AAAAAAAAAA! Help! No Room!

Displayed when the game doesn't have a way to handle a particular room transition. Specifically, many rooms are configured based on the last room the player was in. If the old room isn't internally "connected" to the new room, the game doesn't know what to do and gives this error.

Don't use to-the-void on selected-actor!!

camera actor to the void

thinks there's already a zebra-actor

putting zebra actor in room

didn't repair the raft

killed actor, drawing gone raft

root position

no-sinking override

Molasses machine.

Street legal machine.

Trans-warp drive machine.

script turn-pp-smoothly called.

script wait-3-seconds-then-look-front called.

script putt-looks-at called.

Take this out.

What to do about this?

Song array overflow!!!

Tried to restart ambient when there was none.

Tried to play song

Restarting ambient sound

Restarting music

Starting ambient sound

Starting music

Song finished

Pausing before wind...

Playing wind sound

playing perferred song

playing standard song

Auto-play clicked object:

Auto-play clicked actor:

no standard pool...quitting jump-start-music

Help File

The PUTTZOO.HLP help file contains several unlisted pages containing information on the secret hegames.ini entries. The pages are unindexed and unreferenced, meaning the only way to see them is to specifically look them up with the "Find" function.

"Cool INI entries"

Try adding the following entries to HEGAMES.INI for some fun!

IAmTheMoose
Set this to 71595, then go see the Joke Birds in Jungleland.

ICanDrive
Set this to 71595, then check out the scrapbook at the end of the game.

Gibbon
Set this to 71595, then go see the Rhymin' Monkeys.

MoveInHerds
Set this to 71595, then go to the Observation Point for an inside joke.

"Cool INI Entries Part 2"

UpChuck
Set this to 71595, then have Putt-Putt eat more cotton candy than he should.

HolyMoley
Set this to 71595, then go see the mole?

AutoPlay=<number>
the number is the number of frames to wait before activating autoplay, in tenths of seconds (600 = 1 minute...
I have mine set to 6000, ten minutes)

AutoPlayTouchDoors=<number>
This is the percentage chance that Putt will touch a door... 0 will keep him in the room forever,
100 will move him around quite a bit. 25 may be a realistic real-user average.

(Source: Joe)

Other

Blah, blah, blah...

Placeholder text for the penguin info kiosk. No recorded equivalent exists.

Demo Version

The demo version of the game is present almost in its entirety in the initial CD release, and can be played by force-running script 54 (scr 54 run in ScummVM's debugger). Aside from constant "No Room" errors due to the difference in room numbering between the demo and final versions, everything is fully functional.

The 1999 re-release lacks the demo title graphics, so the game crashes at the point when they should appear.

Revisional Differences

1999 Version

A rather sloppy re-conversion of the Dutch dub, which upgraded the game to a newer revision of the SPUTM/SCUMM engine. Though this brought a few improvements, it also introduced some nasty bugs.

Graphics

1995	1999

The original releases use an older Humongous logo. The 1999 version updates it to the then-current logo and adds the trademark drumroll found in most other games.

The 1999 version retroactively adds the game to the "Junior Adventure" product line. Peculiarly, the logo used is a red-on-yellow variant not seen in any previous Humongous game. It also puts the recommended age group on the exclamation mark, which wouldn't happen again until Pajama Sam 3.

1995	1999

The copyright dates on the title screen were updated.

1995	1999

The 1995 version uses a Windows 3.1-style pause menu, while the 1999 version uses a Windows 95-style pause menu.

1995	1999

All the item cursors were colorized for the 1999 version, though the monochrome versions are still used in the Windows 3.1 interpreter.

Music

Several tracks containing English lyrics were swapped out and replaced with instrumental cues in the 1999 version.

1995	1999

Played when Sammy is rescued. The newer version cuts off strangely.

1995	1999

Played when Little Skeeter is rescued. The 1999 version recycles the music used when talking to Mrs. Boa.

1995	1999

Played when talking to Masai or her mother for the first time.

Other

• It's possible to take Mr. Baldini's picture. This can't be done in the original version, though the graphics and dialogue for it are present.
• The game now adjusts the resolution to 640×480 for you. Originally, it had to be done manually, otherwise the game would be surrounded by black.
• The solid cursor graphic is completely out of alignment with the outlined cursor graphic, causing the pointer to jump down and to the right every time it's hovered over a clickable object.
• When Putt-Putt reads the list of missing animals while talking to Outback Al, the animal names are supposed to be highlighted in red as they're spoken. For some reason, this only happens when Sammy's name is read, and the text actually changes color after it's supposed to be highlighted.
• When clicking "You are here" on the map of the zoo, both the arrow and the text are supposed to highlight at once. In this version, the arrow highlights first when Putt-Putt talks, and once he finishes the arrow stops highlighting just as the text highlights for a brief moment.
• The most severe bug in the rerelease occurs when getting off the raft at the far end of the Jungle Land swamp for the first time. If Putt-Putt is moved onto land but not specifically to another screen, he'll comment about having made it to the other side. Skipping this entire dialogue with ESC (but skipping just the dialogue with "." doesn't happen but will continue to the animation) causes the raft to disappear, leaving no way to proceed. This bug was (partly) fixed in the 2011 iOS release by making the dialogue unskippable.