Cat got your mouse?
CyberPounce - the world's first game designed for cats.
Matt Wolf has spent several years working in the gaming industry, working as a producer with the likes of Sega and Electronic Arts. Now he has founded his own company, Double Twenty Productions, to design an exciting new game .. for cats. Admittedly, in the strictest sense of the word CyberPounce isn't really a game, although Matt describes it as "Quake for kitties". But it was such a stupid "only in America" kind of an idea that we just had to tell you about it...
With its development "overseen by a leading PhD animal behaviorist", CyberPounce offers your feline friend a range of eleven toys to play with on your PC monitor, ranging from cartoon birds, spiders and goldfish to feathers and toy mice. The game also comes complete with two modes - Solo Kitty (which acts like a screensaver and entertains your cat while you're AFK by randomly cycling between toys) and Cat & Mouse (where you can control the movement of the objects with your mouse). Apparently in testing the game could keep cats entertained for upwards of ten minutes at a time, which as any cat owner will tell you is not bad for an animal with such a short attention span. Double Twenty even claim that the game can turn your cat into a mouse-chasing mastermind. Well, maybe not. But it does "stimulate the brainwave patterns in cats, making them active 'thinkers' when they ordinarily would be sleeping". Which can't be a bad thing.
Of course, if you don't like the idea of finding paw prints all over your monitor and having your cat clambering around on your mini-tower, this probably isn't the game for you, although as it will work on anything from a 486 upwards and doesn't need any fancy 3D hardware, you could always dig out your antique PC from the attic and set it up specially for your cat. If you fancy the sound of it, you can find out more on the CyberPounce website.
And what's the next step for Matt Wolf? Well, it seems he's working on a similar product for dogs, although "doing a dog entertainer on a PC kind of scares me [because] some dogs are pretty big - if they got excited, they could easily run away with the entire computer". We can just imagine you trying to explain that one to the insurance company...