Behind The Pixels: Party Cat & Scaredy Cat
Time was running out for the Sega CD. In a marketplace full of consoles with built-in identities (the kid-friendly Super Nintendo, the arcade fighter valhalla of the Neo Geo, the pious HymnSphere), the Sega CD was seen as little more than an unnecessary add-on to the Genesis / Mega Drive, aka the home of Sonic the Hedgehog. Flashy advertisements of the early 90’s boasted about its CD technology and its Full-Motion Video capabilities, when really the system was better defined by its steadily growing library of unique, cerebral games (A Warm Fist In the Cold Dark, Klube, Grenade With Legs). To bridge the gap between market demand and their indie sensibility, it was decided that the Sega CD needed a mascot, one separate from Sonic and his gang. They got two.
“Party Cat & Scaredy Cat literally fell into my lap,” says lead developer Alicia Hewson, fresh off the Game Gear triumph The Horrible Things I’ve Done. “I was brought unconscious into a dark room with no windows or doors, and when I awoke, there were two cats. One hiding beneath my chair, the other proudly nuzzling my chin. A voice crackled on the loudspeaker above me: ‘Begin.’ I knew right away these cats had the charisma to be stars, to be the face of the Sega CD.”
Hewson’s escape from the chamber was in itself a thrilling display of resourcefulness. “Cats are natural escape artists, so I sent the one on my lap down the only hole in the entire room, a chute opening the size of my head. She was extremely quick to venture out, as if this was her calling. The other preferred to stay under the chair, ears tucked back, constantly urinating. I respected this cat’s wishes even if I did not condone them.”
Minutes passed before the fluffier, more adventuresome cat returned with blueprints to the mysterious facility. Rather than pass them to Hewson, she took the schematics directly to the other cat, who was creating a puddle of urine about three feet wide.
“The sheepish cat quickly unfurled the blueprints and started pawing at them, almost as if it was connecting the disparate pathways and corridors to try and decipher our location,” Hewson said, eyes twinkling once more with marvel at the old memory. “I soon realized that these cats were a team, one a bruiser and warrior, full of brio and vigor — the other a nervous genius, capable of piecing together the horrors of the outside world from the comfort of a secure hidey-hole. It seemed they could accomplish anything.”
Soon, Hewson said, the smarter cat had managed to locate the control panel in the dark room — so flush it was to the wall, it could only be found by pressing firmly on the area to open up the panel door. Hewson did so, which uncovered a keycode pad with letters.
Perhaps unthinkingly, the voice on the loudspeaker murmured his thoughts out loud to the room. “Oh dear, these cats are good, I do say.”
As quickly as he blurted out those words, he silenced himself. Hewson didn’t know what to make of this, she told me, but the cats immediately sprang into action.
“The fluffier cat began tearing up the blueprints in her mighty jaw, sending shreds of the paper flying everywhere. Though I was very concerned that we wouldn’t know our way out without those schematics, I have to admit it was a magnificent display. Then as the chunks began to flutter to the ground, I saw that she managed to artfully chew the words on the paper into individual letters, which the smarter cat then began to rearrange with his paws.”
Hewson could only watch, huddling on top of the chair to escape the growing pool of urine, as the cats slaved away at rearranging the loudspeaker man’s words down below.
“Within seconds, they switched up the letters from ‘OH DEAR THESE CATS ARE GOOD I DO SAY’ into ‘THE DOOR CODE IS SEGA SO RAD HATE YA.’”
Hewson scootched her chair back over to the keycode pad, sloshing cat urine everywhere, and entered in the words SEGA SO RAD. “I was about to enter in the words ‘HATE YA’ when an emergency door hissed open. I realized then that ‘Hate ya’ was just something extra the man on the loudspeaker wanted to convey to me, that he hated me. But I was too terrified of the power of these cats to care.”
The cats left the room, and promptly wrote the code for the game that would become Party Cat & Scaredy Cat.
“Working with cats whose outside-the-box problem-solving skills far surpassed my own was…challenging,” Hewson admitted after a pause. “They demanded that their in-game avatars be put to the task of apprehending the Zodiac Killer, which I personally thought was dicey territory. Their larynxes vibrated with the correct frequency to produce a sound like the word ‘No,’ and that was the end of that conversation.
“In fact, ‘No’ was the only word they ever said during the development process. When I fought them over character models, when I fought them over streamlining the puzzle aspects of the game, when I tried to get them to come down from a hard MA-17 rating, it was always just ‘No’ and back to work. I wasn’t sure if that’s because it was the only word they could say, or if they mastered a new, time-effective method of binary communication with humans.”
Eventually, the game was finished under budget and well before schedule. The shocking twist ending, in which it turns out that Alicia Hewson is the Zodiac Killer, was so thoughtfully executed and backed up by mountains of real-world proof that authorities had no choice but to reopen the case.
“It didn’t help that my last game was called The Horrible Things I’ve Done, or that I made it for the Game Gear — which is famously the preferred gaming device of serial killers,” she admits to me from behind the glass of a maximum security prison cell. “And the 60’s and 70’s were honestly a blur to me, but who couldn’t say that about that time if they lived through it?”
Things went from bad to worse for Hewson when The Horrible Things I’ve Done was entered into the court as Exhibit A, and everyone got a turn at playing it — from the judge, to the jury, to other key witnesses. Indeed, the game’s narrative seems to convey a number of dark secrets on behalf of the storyteller, to the extent that the grand jury was convinced of her guilt within days of the trial.
“Nothing in the game explicitly refers to me committing any murders in California during the late ‘60’s and early ‘70’s,” Hewson contends. “I also demanded a mistrial when the two cats were chosen as my pro bono defense team, but the judge simply asked the cats if he should declare a mistrial and they growled ‘No,’ so the case just went on.”
Hewson is convinced she can get out from under her life sentence if she simply convinces the parole board that the two cats were biased against her from the start. More than anything, she just wants to get back to developing games, away from the public eye.
“I feel like my life changed once I woke up in that black room with those two fiends,” she whispers weakly from her cold dank cell. “Even now, it feels like they’re watching me. Laughing at me.”
Indeed, as we left the prison and unzipped our human suit in the backseat of the Uber, we shared a hearty laugh. Though to the driver, it probably just sounded like a bunch of growls and hisses.
