What is Catz?

As landlords become pickier, this may be where all of us pet-loving people end up. Catz (the program) lets you make a playpen for your Catz (the “pet”) on your desktop, and as long as you keep the program running, your electronic friend can frolic to its heart’s content. It’s up to you to play with your Catz, pet it, feed it, groom it, lure out a mouse for it to chase, or do basically anything else you could do with a real cat except feel the fur between your fingers. Of course, considering you don’t have to deal with hairballs, litter boxes, or broken crockery, it might not be such a bad exchange.

After the simple installation, you choose your adoptee from five types (my fave is Pouncer) . You can rename your pet, paint it a new color, and then plop it into its new playpen, which you can customize with parquet floors, carpet, etc. There’s a shelf full of useful items (such as a brush, food, water), toys (the “cat dancer” bobs around amazingly accurately), and a mouse hole, from which a mouse occasionally pops for your Catz to chase — Catz never kill the mice though, no matter how much I cheer on my little Pouncer (renamed Kitsune).

Catz also has a practical side. You can set your own Catz to be a screen saver (CatNapz), and even enable password protection. You can also put an Adoption Kit onto two floppies and give them to a friend, who’ll then have a limited-time version of Catz, which can be upgraded into a full version through the Web site or by calling the company.

At first, I was put off by the cartoon-style depictions, but PFMagic did such a good job of programming realistic cat behavior that I soon overlooked it. I found myself spending inordinate amounts of time petting Kitsune, brushing him, and whirling around the cat dancer.

So, yes, it’s just a computer thing, but it’s a lot more fun on your screen than fish.

Turner, D. D. (November 1996). Catz. MacAddict. (pg. 85).

 

See also: Dogz, Oddballz: Your Wacky Computer Petz

Download Catz for Mac

Architecture

68K + PPC (FAT)

System Requirements

From Mac OS 7.0

Compatibility notes

Minimum Requirements

• MC68040 @ 33 MHz
• 5 MB RAM
• 13 MB hard disk available
• System 7.0

Emulating this? It could probably run under: Basilisk II