It's Critter Time!

Petz, by PF.Magic, is a series of virtual pet games with shockingly complex genetics, personality values, and AI! You might have heard of Petz before, but it might've only have been their mostly shovelware games after the post-ubisoft acquisition, which took away much of the care and complexity the old games had.

The Pf.Magic series spans 1995-2002, and includes:

• Dogz (1995) and Catz (1996)
• Oddballz (1996)
• Catz and Dogz II (1997)
• Catz and Dogz 3 (1998)
• Catz and Dogz 4 (1999)
• Babyz (1999)
• Catz and Dogz 5 (2002)

Petz 3-5 in particular have a robust modding community, most active in the early aughts but has survived to this day. Starting with simply directly editing the hex code of certain petz, the community has created many tools and guides for customization. The most popular game to mod (and play in general) is Petz 4, and this is the version I use. Petz 3-5 also have breeding, and it's very fun to mess around with genetics and crossbreeds




Here's two screenshots from my game! The first is a picture of some of the bred petz i own (two of them using community-made breeds) and the second is an image of the hexies (aka, edited petz) i've made (the rat being built based on a community-made breed). They look better in motion, it's very hard to get good shots when everyone's moving all the time

Did you grow up with these games? Do you play it now? Are you interested in playing it again? I'd love to hear your thoughts! I feel like a lot of retro tech furries would greatly appreciate the Petz series!

I remember playing Catz at a friend's house. He had a ginger kitten that you could feed and if he misbehaved, you could spray water at it and he would go "mrowll!" I also remember throwing the ball really hard so that it bounced all over the screen and caused the kitten to do a forwards roll as he tried to catch it.

Dogz and Catz were so much fun as a kid. I spent quite a bit of time with them on our Power Mac running System 7. In my opinion, they are the gold standard for a computer desktop companion.

Unfortunately, they don't seem to work as well on my current retro Mac, a G4 "Quicksilver" from 2000 running Mac OS 9. I forget the details, but last time I tried to install, my computer didn't like it. Maybe I should try again, since they are such good critters.