80s CGA Cat Breeding game?

February 9, 2011 2:16 PM

There's this quasi-educatainment game that I had in the 80s. It was CGA graphics, on MS-DOS... The idea was breeding cats with dominant and recessive genes. The only cat game I can seem to find online is Alley Cat, but that's nothing like it. This game is a grid of something like 4 cats across, and 2 down. I don't remember what the exact point of the game was.
posted by symbioid to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

Best answer: This sounds like a game my partner remembers from high school biology that I think she called Catlab. (Google suggests that such a thing did exist and that its third edition came out in 1998.)
posted by clavicle at 9:39 PM on February 9, 2011 [1 favorite]

Best answer: I found a cat-themed games group maintained over at MobyGames. Here are the pages covering games from 1992-1984 and 1983-1972 (the entries are organized in reverse chronological order). I looked through them, but none of the games there now seems to match your description. It's probably worth checking the list again, though. If the game you played isn't in the group, maybe it'll show up there in the future. (That is, as long as the cats in the game meet the very specific group criteria and aren't Tasmanian tigers!)

On preview: Here's a link to an educational software title called Catlab. Looks like it might be what clavicle mentioned.
posted by rangefinder 1.4 at 10:37 PM on February 9, 2011 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: LOL @ mobygames note:
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Limitations:
* Games featuring Tasmanian tigers are not included, since this animal does not belong to the felidae family.

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That said, I can't seem to find any images of the software. Maybe I can write to the company to find out. That sounds more advanced than the stuff I used, but the description does sound vaguely similar. It's a shame moby games doesn't have it listed.
posted by symbioid at 8:37 AM on February 10, 2011

Hi symbioid, I just wanted to mention that the link for the MobyGames cat-themed games group (from my old comment above) is now outdated. It appears the group got renamed on the MobyGames site, so it's now the "Animals: Cats" game group.

Hope that helps you and others looking for cat games in the future. (I happened to be looking for a different cat-themed game recently and remembered this thread.)
posted by rangefinder 1.4 at 2:04 PM on January 14, 2012