.ZOO File Extension

A ZOO file is a compressed archive created by the zoo compression program. It contains one or more files that have been compressed using a variant of the Lempel-Ziv-Welch (LZW) compression algorithm. Zoo was primarily available on Unix systems, so Unix users are most likely to encounter ZOO files.

In the 1980s, developer Rahul Dhesi created the zoo compression program and the ZOO file format. Zoo was available for Unix-based operating systems, MS-DOS, and AmigaOS.

Notably, ZOO archives can contain multiple versions of the same file, if each version was modified on a different date. This allows zoo users to save and retrieve prior versions of a file from a ZOO archive, to revert to a previous version or compare an old version to a more recent version.

You can open a ZOO file with Logipole Konvertor (Windows), ESTsoft ALZip (Windows), The Unarchiver (Mac), or zoo (Windows, Linux).

Saved game file created with Zoo Tycoon, a zoo simulation game developed by Microsoft; stores game progress so the player can resume the game at a later time; should be stored in the "Saved Games" folder within the Zoo Tycoon directory.