Maybe your parents were cooler than average, but the wider cultural conversation wasn’t. It’s the very existence of the sentence, “The Japanese toymaker Nintendo has come out with a new set of electronic video games.” An alien wrote that sentence. You might think the funniest part of this is the reporter being greenscreened into a racing game and driving backwards but you’d be wrong. Please watch this 1991 report on the upsetting price of the SNES: News segments from the time tried to explain the fad to parents across the country. In the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, when I was just a wee baby solving math problems in Super Solvers: Treasure Mountain!, video games were widely seen as kids’ toys. That was because he had just been through hell after the media backlash to Night Trap. But the timing of the release was also perfect for Rob Fulop, the game’s developer. Petz wouldn’t have been nearly as effective if the pets themselves weren’t so cute and reactive. They would do tricks in response to specific mouse gestures, and react to a whole host of objects. In retrospect, the AI for these little critters is pretty clever. They could actually leave the game window and run around on your desktop, because this was the 90s and that was cool. You could adopt and play with dogz and catz (always with a z) on your PC. This was a bitter blow, but that fad blew over and I got something even better: Catz 2.ĭogz and Catz technically predated tamagotchi by about a year, making them the first virtual pets. I wasn’t allowed to have a tamagotchi as a kid.

Catz pc game 1995