Alley Cat

Released

1983 on Atari 8-bit

Credits

1 person

Releases by Date (by platform)

Publishers

Developers

Synapse Software Corporation

Moby Score

7.3

#8,679 of 162K

Critics

80% (1)

Players

(82)

Ranking

#8 on PC Booter
#14 on Atari 8-bit

Collected By

65 players

Genre: Action
Perspective: Side view
Visual: Fixed / flip-screen
Gameplay: Arcade
Platform

Atari 8-bit Specs [ all ]

Business Model: Commercial
Media Type: 5.25" Floppy Disk, Cassette Tape
Number of Offline Players: 1 Player

Description official description

Alley Cat is an action game consisting of several mini games tied together. You're a little black cat who wants to make love to a pretty lady cat that lives in an apartment complex. Play all kinds of cat-themed mini games in order to reach her and score as many points as you can while doing so.

You start out in an alley and need to get inside the apartment by climbing on garbage cans and a fence. Next, jump on a clothesline and through several open windows while big dogs try to eat you and people throw garbage at you. Outside of the apartment complex you can score points by eating the mice that run across the clotheslines. Once you've jumped through a window you enter a room where you play a randomly assigned mini game.

These mini games include: eating all the fish in a fish bowl, stealing milk from a bunch of bulldogs, pushing a birdcage from a table and eating the bird, catching mice inside a big cheese, pushing vases from a cabinet. To make things harder there's always a broom inside every room that tries to knock you around. You score points by completing the mini games within a certain time (the faster the better).

After you've completed a mini game you're back in the alley. Make your way back inside the apartment complex and you get a chance to play the love-cat game: try to reach the lady cat on the top row of hearts while rival male cats and cupid's arrows knock you down. After you've mated, the difficulty gets cranked up a notch.

Groups +

Screenshots

Credits (Atari 8-bit version)

By	Bill Williams

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 80% (based on 1 ratings)

Players

Average score: 3.7 out of 5 (based on 82 ratings with 5 reviews)

Probably one of the first PC games I ever saw

The Good
Pc-speaker music is good. (It almost has a feeling of many instruments... which is quiet hard to do with Pc-speaker)

The game is easy to learn.

The game is just so GOooooooooooooooood!

The Bad
When the dog catches the cat the animation and sound are quiet bad. But it's not a big problem considering the game is as old as I am.

The Bottom Line
You play a cat and try to manage odd tasks. Try it now!

PC Booter · by Heikki Sairanen (76) · 2000

Cute and exciting...

The Good
This was one of the first games I played that has Tweaked Pc Speaker sound effects. It really amazed me. When you "die" you can hear a real "Me-oooow" out of your Pc speaker, I loved it! Just like the music. It was very cool and it gave the game more life. Also the different scenes of the game. It was a very small game but you could do a lot of different things... A Masterpiece!

The Bad
Uh... :-)

The Bottom Line
A nice cute kitty kitty game. Do what Real Cats do. Very cool Game!

PC Booter · by Donny K. (451) · 1999

An adorable 80's memory that still works!

The Good
Most games that are this "old" don't run very well on newer machines, or don't run at all. This game, however, ran perfectly and was a true testament to early gaming.

I loved the cat concept (I'm a cat lover, myself) and the objectives and obstacles that you needed to negotiate were right-on for an alley cat, such as avoiding larger and more territorial toms and navigating your way from housewives who don't like you.

There were several mini-games included, and you accessed these by sneaking your way into open windows. These were entertaining and again, very, very cute.

I also found the game comical. It didn't take itself too seriously and I replay it constantly for the sheer entertainment value of it all. There aren't many more games that feature cats as a protagonist and I think this should be a glaring hint to developers ;-).

The Bad
It's hard to say, because I always remember that I need to evaluate games within their proper era. For its time, I think it did a wonderful job. The only thing that I found annoying was the sound, but again, that's just a time-period thing.

The Bottom Line
Fun, cute, and good for all ages. Sometimes the controls got clunky, but that's forgivable due to its nature.

PC Booter · by Kitty Says Meow (18) · 2007

[ View all 5 player reviews ]

Trivia

Compatibility

Alley Cat was one of the few games of the 1980s that was programmed with full attention to different PC speeds. It's an early, old game--yet it runs perfectly on any machine. The reason it runs on any computer today is, upon loading, the first thing it performs is a mathematical routine to determine the speed of your processor, and as of 2003 we've yet to build an Intel PC too fast to play it.

PCjr / Tandy support

The game supports the PCjr out of the box and uses an alternate CGA palette. However, Tandy support wasn't available until an amateur patch was created in 2015. It can be found here.