Four Colour

Alley Cat

The first game I ever played was actually on the Atari 2600 which we can't select yet but this was I think the first PC game I played. It was a pirated copy on my friend's Dad's IBM 5150 with an orange plasma display that he got to take home from his government job because he had some work reason to need it.

Growing up before then, we had an Atari 130XE in my house and I had no idea this actually came out on the Atari 8-bit line of computers before the PC. The PC version was actually published by IBM, one of a handful of random times they decided to back games for their computers they largely insisted were for serious business types.

Created by an at the time, very young Bill Williams (1960-1998) for Synapse Software, this game had a surprising number of different mechanics and ideas going for it, in an era before the stalwarts of platformers like Super Mario Bros. You started in an alley where you had to dodge various obstacles as you jumped up onto a fence and then find your way to one of the open windows to jump in before it closed and moved to another one.

Inside each window was a different minigame ranging in length, complexity and difficulty. Some would have you doing an almost Frogger-like jumping puzzle to try to get to a female cat you were wooing. Another had you jump into a small fish bowl that suddenly became the size of a swimming pool, trying to eat all the fish while avoiding the electric eels that were in the bowl with them for some reason. Another had you trying to sneakily drink bowls of milk that were guarded by a dozen or so mean dogs in a single apartment (boy, that place must have smelled lovely) without waking them up. And among others, perhaps the weirdest one was where you entered an apartment full of the largest block of cheese known to man, trying to catch all the mice that were hiding inside it. The faster you completed each challenge, the more points you earned. This was a score attack game so your goal was to stay alive and complete as many games as possible to get the highest score.

The one consistent element in all of these was the sentient and super aggressive broom that would pursue you and try to knock you out the window of the apartment you were in Smash Bros. style, causing you to fail the minigame and lose a life. The only thing it hated more than you was dirt (that was its purpose after all) and everywhere you walked left pawprints so your goal was to leave a big trail of them to distract it while you focused on the minigame.

Things would get real hard, real fast and you were considered pretty skilled if you could get a session to last more than 10 minutes. It hooked into you the way arcade games of the day did and always gave you that feeling of "I can do better!" that made you start another game. It was hard but not in the kind of mean way that many arcade games used to suck money out of your pockets. You could play with a joystick if you had one handy but it worked quite well with a keyboard as well. It only supported CGA graphics which had a shall we say, unique colour palette that some love and others hate. The graphics weren't at the technical level of machines like even the Atari 8-Bit line that this was originally made for because well, IBM didn't build their early computers for games. It still ran very well though and used the limited capabilities it was given to great effect.

Mechanically, Alley Cat was ahead of its times in many ways and when it first came to the PC in 1984, there was nothing remotely like it on the platform. It was fast, fluid, fun, addictive and quite a feat for a guy who was only 24 at the time. It's in the eXoDOS collection and also available to play for free on any number of web sites. Interestingly, someone made a free fan remake in 2020 that has better graphics, mechanics and even 4 player co-op and a versus mode! You can try it here: https://gamejolt.com/games/alleycatremeow/327439

I definitely recommend checking this one out as it still plays well to this day. I spent many an hour playing this with my friends and kept a copy around well into the 90s as it always ran at a playable speed, even on much newer hardware. Fun times!