LGR - Catz, Dogz, and Oddballz: Petz Retrospective

Me and my sister loved Catz, though she'd always scold me for painting our cat odd colours.

Lolz xD

floverSaeu09

Awesome video. I played a trial of Catz, but otherwise stuck to 2, 3, & briefly 4. I coparented for a few years and introduced our little guy to the series (his favorite was 5). :)

evistre

Wow. I have forgotten that I have played oddballz. I don't know where in my life I have played the game but I sure do remember it!

Nick Schafer

I purchased Dogs jn a "Creature" pack for £10, along with Worms (and a third game I don't remember). It certainly was a novelty, but a very unique and enjoyable one for the era.

Peter Bridger

I really loved my cat made of ballz :D

thats an awfully polite way of putting it lol.

Growing up in the 90's I wish I had this as a kid.

Omg, remember that my sister had Dogz. Cool :)

That is one curmudgeonly Santa.

PushingUpRoses

I remember Little Computer People on my dads C64 which was the closest i came to a virtual pet like game. I mean you did have to feed him or your person would get seriously ill and lay in bed all day.

Matthew Belshan

Is that... is that YOU in that santa suit?!

Jeremy Abel

I would say that "Neko" was the first virtual pet that I know of. I remember playing with it quite a bit on Windows 3.1. A quick Wikipedia search says it was originally developed for the NEC PC-9801 in 1989.

Steve Lovelace

Wow, the Sims 4 expansion is looking weird.

SammyToesis

i remember playing this on my grandparents PC, I loved to just constantly spray the cats till they hated me, What, I turned out fine.

Christian

Like the comments above... I never played Dogz or Catz, but I have the whole Creatures series. Those were endlessly more complex, and definitely included death. I'd love to see a video about that series sometime.

Zem Hysong

I had Creatures back then, exploring and teaching the Norms. Still have the disk and the CD somewhere. :D

BastetFurry

I really need to try oddballz that one seems up my rally.

Ezydenias

My favourite virtual pet was the esheep, a virtual interactive sheep that walked on windows, climbed them, intermittently baa, tinkle, etc. It was a standalone executable file that works on Windows 3.1 though to 10 (32-bit only). It doesn't work on 64-bit Windows such as Windows 10 x64. Each launch of the executable would add another sheep on screen, up to 9 maximum. When I helped set up my sister's PC many years back, I thought it would make an interesting screensaver by renaming the executable file to 'sheep.scr'. What I forgot is that the user needs to terminate the sheep process, unlike a true screensaver. So a week later, my sister called saying that when she leaves her PC for 5 minutes, a sheep starts wandering about her screen and each time she leaves her PC, they multiply... Whoops! :-)

Seán Byrne

I had catz back then and found ways to download new toys and such to interactive with them

Paul Unser

I think I played either Oddballz, or a clone of it, when I was a kid. I distinctly remember hatching eggs, and dropping the ones I didnt like down a chute.

Nordicberserk

Great video!!! I remember we had Dogz II growing up. I believe Dogz II had a mechanic that if you ignored the dogs or didn't play with them for X amount of time they would "run away". However, we discovered if you copied the dog file (for that dog) to another folder or disk, you can just put them back in and they would appear again.

Mac84

Great video! I used to play Petz 4 as a kid, spending most of the time creating different backgrounds out of car pictures left by the previous owner of the computer, but what i remember the most regarding Petz is how a classmate's older brother played a trick on me saying that those games write their timing routines into BIOS and if you don't feed your pets every day, they die. That made me worried for a while until i looked into a manual.

Michael Vokabre

Catz was one of my favourite franchise growing up. Thank you for this retrospective!

I remember the 3rd or 4th one refusing to work on XP. So Windows ME was like the last thing it would play nice with.

I knew about the petz games, but dang I didn't know just how many there were. It's amazing how such a simple concept can be so successful

Zachary Outen