Alley Cat

Overview

Alley Cat was created by Bill Williams and was released for the Atari 8bit platform in 1983 and for PC in 1984

The game begins in an alley with a fence and a big building with several windows that open and close randomly. As the titular alley cat, the player has to climb up to the windows by platform jumping on garbage cans and a fence and by climbing clothing lines. Random objects are constantly thrown out the opening windows, and getting hit pushes the cat back to the ground. While on the ground, the cat can get attacked by a bulldog, resulting in the loss of a life. Each window contains a room with a challenge, such as entering a fish bowl and eating all the fish or stealing food from sleeping dogs without waking them up. Most of the rooms contains a disembodied broomstick that chases and pushes the cat around. The player can run back and forth on the bottom of the screen to leave dirty footprints for the broomstick to clean up to keep it busy.

Once a challenge has been completed the cat is thrown back to the street again, only this time the open windows show a female cat. Jumping into one starts a new challenge where the cat is standing on the bottom of several rows of hearts, some of the which can be stepped on, and some of which can't. Arrows are constantly being shot from the sides of the screen and any hearts they touch change state. The top row has a female cat and the other rows have male enemy cats. The player has to get up to the female cat, but every time he touches an enemy or gets hit by an arrow he is booted down one row. Falling through the bottom row ends the challenge but does not result in a loss of life. Getting to the top and kissing the female cat ends the level and presents the player with a victory screen in which a number of cats (depending on which the level) are dancing. The game then starts over at a higher difficulty level.