Nihil or Less

During the Spamton Sweepstakes two years ago, there was a website for the event originally hosted on Fangamer (later moved to the Deltarune website), which contained a bunch of pages including lots of sneak-peaks into the upcoming Ch3 as well as other fun easter eggs. Including a bunch of blog posts made by Noelle.

(Now, as a general disclaimer I'm pretty sure Toby Fox has officially stated that the Spamton Sweepstakes stuff can't be considered canon but it's still fun to talk about)

One of the things Noelle talks about in her blog posts is a game she calls Cat Petterz 2. Here's her first mention of the game in her blog:

Most Youtube videos you'll find discussing the Spamton Sweepstakes stuff fail to mention what IRL game Cat Petterz is actually inspired by. But the game that inspired it is called Petz.

Petz was created by a company called P.F. Magic in the 90s. (More or less the era Noelle, Kris etc seem to grow up in) Specifically, the Petz games were available as stand-alone games titled 'Catz' or 'Dogz,' and they were called 'Petz' if you got a version that combined both cats and dogs. There were 5 versions total of these games. (Catz/Dogz 2 released in 1997, for reference) A different company acquired rights to the 'Dogz/Catz' title from P.F. Magic eventually, but the games they put out under the label are vastly different (and pure garbage imo). So only games 1 - 5 are the P.F. Magic Petz.

Screencap from 2007 I took of my Petz 5 game:

Like Noelle says in her blog post, Catz was a virtual pet game on the computer. Later games did indeed include a pretty advanced breeding system. It was possible to selectively breed for traits in these games just like you do with animals in real life. You also could "hex edit" the game data exactly as Noelle describes. There was a huge online community for Petz dedicated to making these mods for the game. (And yes, we did call it hex editing) I did a little hex editing but I was nowhere near as talented as some people were. Noelle's description of being able to make birds, hamsters, cars, cartoons characters, etc., is no exaggeration. Some people were wildly talented at hex editing. Anso's Petz was especially good at making hexies and putting out guides to making them.

Just as Noelle says, results when breeding two very different hexed breeds together could be a bit unpredictable. But the spooky glitches she describes aren't something that happened, as far as I know. I don't think there was any incompatable pet message (this was a long time ago so I can only report what I recall), and I didn't get any glitchy music. Usually you just got offspring that looked really, really, REALLY weird. (I spent a lot of time breeding these freaks of nature.) The game might freeze or crash if the pet didn't know which sound file to access, or something like that, but it was a pretty resilient game and didn't crash often. Unless you did something extra silly with the game files.

God, I keep looking at what I've typed so far and feeling like this must look exactly like one of Noelle's blog posts. This feels weird.

Anyway, Noelle describes the offspring as eggs. In Dogz and Catz, the offspring weren't eggs; cats had a litter of kittens and dogs had a litter of puppies, as you'd expect. However, P.F. Magic made another virtual pet game extremely similar to Dogz and Catz which DID involve eggs:

This game is called Oddballz. There was only ever 1 Oddballz game and you could not breed the pets in this game. The pets were not based on real animals, they were just fantastical creatures. When the Oddballz were sleeping, they stayed inside their eggs in the incubator, and when you wanted to play with one, you pulled an egg out and it hatched. It's possible Toby was mixing the Catz and Oddballz concepts together for Cat Petterz. It's also possible his reference to 'eggs' was inspired in part by the 'Bad Egg' you could first find in the generation 3 Pokemon games, which are glitchy eggs that would appear if something was funky with the data. Bad Eggs could not be hatched (trying to do so would crash the game), and because they also couldn't be traded or released, they could fill up your PC storage box and thus were feared. (Of course, the whole 'egg' thing is also probably referencing Pipis, but we already know that)

Here is Noelle's entry about 'secret cats' in her Cat Petterz game:

Most of this blog entry departs from how Catz actually worked. There were not any hidden, secret cats you could unlock in the game. There WERE additional breeds that the company released after selling the games, which you could download from the website and install into your game. (There were additional species of Oddballz, too) But they were not secret and were accessible to all simply by downloading, basically free DLC before DLC was really a concept. That said, I have a LOT of mods added to my Petz game, and I just want to say having too many mods can make the game act wonky (mine now does) so that part is based somewhat in reality.

I also want to say that Petz did indeed run away due to neglect, so that part's based on the actual game too. Basically if you ignored your pets/didn't launch the game for too long they would run away. If you took really good care of your remaining pets, there was the chance your runaway pets would return, though.

There was no way for a pet to run away from happiness. But happiness WAS an actual meter in the game, among the many meters a pet had. (all such meters were hidden values. I have a mod that can show the hidden values though.) So in theory one could mod the game for something like that to happen.

The next Noelle entry that mentions the Cat Petterz game:

The "special visual style" Noelle mentions makes it crystal-clear beyond ALL doubt (not that there was any doubt before tbh) that this is a spoof of P.F. Magic's Petz. You see, each pet is made up of a bunch of balls as building blocks. If you look at a picture of a pet, you might be able to notice the balls:

It's a bit easier to see on my cat Lullaby here, since she's a hexie breed with a lot of wacky colors: the middle dark blue ball of her belly, the lighter blue ball of her rump, etc.

They're actually called 'ballz' in the game files because everything had a z stuck to the end, lol. Here's a sample of what a breed file looks like when you open it up to modify it:

This is part of a breed file for the Alley Cat breed. This is what hex editing involved, opening these files and changing the hexadecimal code directly. Noelle is claiming she took the series of numbers she received and plugged them into a breed file like that!

And the result for her was a single, floating blue ball. Obviously a Pipis reference, and also something that would be incredibly easy to mod in Petz. It also again may be inspired in part by Bad Eggs from Pokemon, which cannot be disposed of and can fill up the PC storage and the only easy way to remove them is to wipe the save file (or perform some advanced glitch manipulations). Bad Egg in Pokemon was likely meant as an error handler, which means essentially when something goes wrong, instead of the game crashing catastrophically (haha, cat-astrophically) or allowing glitchy/hacked pokemon to hatch, it makes a Bad Egg. However some fans speculated Bad Eggs were also meant to punish the player for cheating since they often showed up with hacked pokemon/illegal movesets/etc. There also were rumors that Bad Eggs would multiply, like the Pipis in Noelle's game, although I believe that was just a rumor. Regardless, this blog entry seems a fusion of Pokemon Bad Egg spooky stories and Petz game mechanics.

The last major blog entry mentioning Cat Petterz is this one:

The later Petz games did have some mini-games, actually, BUT they were pretty simplistic and not exactly exciting. We're talking tic-tac-toe, rock-paper-scissors, simon says, stuff like that. I wanna show you an example but, um. You know how I mentioned my Petz 5 game has a lot of mods installed and acts weird now? Yeah, it's a bit messed up:

I probably need to do a clean install of the game. Anyway, the Knight up there is who you play rock-paper-scissors with. The game Noelle describes in her blog entry-- and links to-- is most similar to the Scarab Crunch game in Petz 5, which is just a very basic 'click on the thing that appears before it vanishes' thing. There were not special beetles to increase your score, it was a 'catch 6 to win' kind of thing, very simple. Still, it's neat to see just how many details Noelle mentions do have some basis in the IRL games.

Anyway, I hope some of you enjoyed reading me ramble about my beloved virtual pet game from long ago. While it's ancient history by now, the games were actually very popular back in the day. And as I mentioned, the online community for Petz was pretty big. We called it 'the PC' or Petz Community. There were lots of personal websites, webrings and discussion forums dedicated to it. People would hex-edit to create their own toys, clothing items, environments for the pets to play in, their own pet breeds, and so forth. They also would have selective breeding projects, put pets up for adoption online, offer kennel services for people on vacation, and we also had dog/cat shows that we'd compete in. I did a lot of cat shows, actually. It really was a whole big thing, in part because P.F. Magic embraced the modding community, but also because the games were genuinely really good and fun to play even on their own.