Cats in Video Games: From Cait Sith to Stray

Cats in video games have been around since the Atari 8-bit era, and for most of that time they were a shortcut. Give a character whiskers and a tail, and players read “agile, clever, slightly untrustworthy” without a single line of dialogue. What changed over four decades is not the shorthand, it is who gets to hold the controller. The cat moved from mascot to sidekick to species to protagonist, and along the way it quietly forced designers to rethink cameras, verbs, and what a player is even allowed to do with their hands.

This is the actual history, with dates and numbers. Scottish folklore filtered through a Japanese RPG. A failed Xbox mascot drawn by the creator of Sonic the Hedgehog. A small French studio that studied a Sphynx.

Table of Contents

• Freddy the Cat and the 38 Kilobyte Alley
• Cait Sith: A Scottish Fairy Inside a Shinra Spy
• The Cat Who Was Supposed to Beat Mario
• The Khajiit Problem: Cats as a Whole Species
• Morgana, Neko Atsume, and Japan’s Cat Economy
• Cats in Video Games Become a Genre
• Stray: The Cat as a Camera
• What Cats in Video Games Do to Design
• FAQ

Freddy the Cat and the 38 Kilobyte Alley

In 1983, Synapse Software published Alley Cat for the Atari 8-bit family. You played Freddy, a cat climbing a washing line into open apartment windows, trying to reach a white cat named Felicia. Behind each window sat a different mini-game: dodging a dog, fishing in an aquarium, running across a table while a mouse escaped, avoiding a broom.

Bill Williams wrote it, building on a one-screen prototype by John Harris, who had lost interest in where it was heading. IBM published a DOS version in 1984, and that port is why a generation of office computers had a cat game on them. The whole thing fits in roughly 38 kilobytes, smaller than the icon of most modern apps.

Alley Cat already contains the template that later games would spend decades refining. The cat is not a warrior. It is a trespasser. Its goals are horizontal, not heroic: get in, knock something over, get out.

Cait Sith: A Scottish Fairy Inside a Shinra Spy

Square released Final Fantasy VII in 1997 with a party member who was, structurally, one of the strangest characters in the series. Cait Sith is a small fortune-telling cat riding on top of a large moogle. Tetsuya Nomura designed him, and he was conceived as two characters fused into one, a plan Nomura had wanted to try since early development.

The folklore behind the name

The name comes from the cat-sìth of Scottish and Irish folklore: a large black cat with a white chest spot, associated with death and with witches who could take feline form. One version of that belief, that a witch could change into a cat nine times before being trapped in the shape forever, is a commonly cited origin of the nine lives idea. We covered how black cats collected their reputation in the history of black cat superstitions.

Note the grammar joke buried in the localisation: “Cait Sìth” is the plural form, the singular being “Cat Sìth”. Which fits neatly with the plot, since the character is a mass-produced robot and more than one unit shows up.

A spy with a megaphone

In the story, Cait Sith is not alive. He is a remote-controlled machine operated by Reeve Tuesti, an executive at the Shinra Electric Power Company, who inserts him into the party as an informant. The cat that joins your heroes is spyware with a crown and a megaphone. Later English localisations, starting with the 2005 film Advent Children, gave him a Scottish accent, closing the loop back to the folklore. He returned in Final Fantasy VII Remake and Rebirth.

The Cat Who Was Supposed to Beat Mario

By 2002, Microsoft had a console and no mascot. The answer arrived from Tokyo. Artoon, a studio founded in 1999 by Naoto Ohshima, the designer of Sonic the Hedgehog, pitched a character platformer built to show off Xbox hardware. Ohshima had looked at the specifications and concluded the machine could handle something no other console could: rewinding time as a gameplay verb.

The result was Blinx: The Time Sweeper, developed by Artoon with Microsoft Game Studios Japan and released in North America on October 8, 2002. Blinx is a cat with a vacuum cleaner that sucks up time itself, letting you record, rewind, pause, and fast-forward chunks of the level. It is a genuinely clever mechanic, arguably ahead of the time-manipulation games that would get acclaim years later.

It did not make Blinx a household name. A sequel, Blinx 2: Masters of Time & Space, followed on November 16, 2004, and the character then vanished. The lesson looked simple: a cat mascot had to be better than the platformers it competed with, not merely cuter.

The Khajiit Problem: Cats as a Whole Species

Not every cat in gaming is a single character. Bethesda’s Khajiit arrived in 1994 with The Elder Scrolls: Arena, and at that point they were barely feline: fair-skinned humanoids with painted faces. By Daggerfall in 1996 they had grown more bestial as the world of Tamriel was fleshed out, and by Morrowind and Skyrim they were unmistakably cat people.

What matters is how Bethesda handled the inconsistency. Rather than quietly retconning the old art, the studio wrote the variation into the lore. Khajiit come from the province of Elsweyr, and their form is decided by the phase of the moon Secunda at birth, producing seventeen recorded breeds that range from near-human to something closer to a large hunting animal. A design accident became a mythology.

Morgana, Neko Atsume, and Japan’s Cat Economy

Hit-Point, a small software company in Kyoto, released Neko Atsume on October 20, 2014. It was built by programmer Yutaka Takasaki in the gaps between other projects. You put food and toys in a yard, close the app, and come back later to find which cats visited. There is no fail state and almost no interaction. The internal download target was around 50,000 a year.

It reached about 4 million downloads across iOS and Android by May 2015 and roughly 5.5 million shortly after, driven almost entirely by players posting screenshots of their visitors on social media. The game had no English version at first, and the studio later found that up to 40 percent of downloads came from Western users who were playing a Japanese-language app they could not fully read. The cats did the translating.

Two years later, Atlus put a cat at the centre of a 100-hour role-playing game. Morgana, in Persona 5 (2016), is an ordinary black cat in the real world and a talking companion inside the Metaverse, where he insists he is human. Character designer Shigenori Soejima built him as the non-human counterweight to a cast of teenagers, using primary toy colours, red, yellow and blue, to separate him visually from the humans. The same trick had worked for non-human companions in earlier Persona games, and it works here because a cat reads as familiar and alien at once.

Cats in Video Games Become a Genre

Around the late 2010s something shifted. Cats in video games stopped being a character choice and started being a market. Two small studios on opposite sides of the world proved it.

The Gentlebros, a studio in Singapore, released Cat Quest in 2017: an open-world action role-playing game where every pun is a cat pun and the map is shaped like a cat. It was not a novelty release. By 2022 the series had passed 2.5 million copies sold across its entries, and an earlier tally credited the franchise with 1.3 million paid downloads and more than S$5.2 million in revenue. A studio built around one joke turned it into three games and a sustainable business.

Then there is Little Kitty, Big City, from Double Dagger Studio, released on May 9, 2024 for Windows, Nintendo Switch and Xbox, and on PlayStation exactly a year later. The studio was founded in 2019 by Matt T. Wood, whose credits include Half-Life 2, Left 4 Dead, Portal 2 and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive at Valve, plus earlier work at 3D Realms and Remedy. He left shooters to make a game about a cat knocking things off shelves. It sold over 100,000 copies in two days and passed 2 million players on Game Pass by July 2024.

Both sit inside a wider wave of animal-led games that trade combat for curiosity, mapped in our list of the best indie games of all time, alongside a cozy game with no combat at all and a museum mystery starring a cat detective.

Stray: The Cat as a Camera

Stray arrived on July 19, 2022 for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5 and Windows, developed by BlueTwelve Studio in the south of France and published by Annapurna Interactive. Xbox versions followed on August 10, 2023, Nintendo Switch on November 19, 2024, and Switch 2 on May 28, 2026. It runs on Unreal Engine 4, and the team stayed deliberately tiny, at five people by the end of 2017 and still small at launch.

The real cats in the credits

The protagonist is based on Murtaugh, an orange tabby the studio’s founders, who go by Viv and Koola, found under a car in Montpellier. He was, appropriately, a stray. A second cat, Riggs, shaped the design, and a Sphynx named Oscar came into the studio daily so animators could watch how a cat distributes weight, lands front paws first, and tests a surface before committing. Producer Swann Martin-Raget described the goal as freedom with precision, which is why every jump succeeds: you cannot fall, because a cat that misses looks wrong.

A city built for a cat

The walled city in the game draws on Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong, the famously dense settlement demolished in 1994. The team described it as an ideal playground for a cat, because it grew organically, with pipes, ledges, awnings and improvised staircases forming routes no architect designed. That is not decoration. It is level design logic: a cat needs a world with a vertical grain.

The reception was immediate. Roughly 2.5 million copies and about $57 million in revenue on Steam within the first month, a Metacritic score in the low 80s, and wins at The Game Awards 2022 for Best Independent Game and Best Debut Indie Game, plus Best Debut at the Game Developers Choice Awards and PlayStation Game of the Year at the Golden Joysticks. Twenty years after Blinx, the cat finally carried a game on its own.

What Cats in Video Games Do to Design

Here is the argument this history supports. Cats in video games are not a theme, they are a constraint, and the constraint is what makes them good.

Start with hands. A cat cannot open a door, fire a weapon, or read a note. Every standard verb in a third-person game disappears. Designers respond either by cheating (give the cat a robot friend, a sword, a talking form) or by rebuilding the vocabulary around pushing, knocking, squeezing, scratching and hiding. Stray takes the second route and hands the missing verbs to a drone companion. Cat Quest takes the first and gives the cat a sword. Both are legitimate. Both are shaped by the same missing thumbs.

Then there is the camera. A cat protagonist puts the viewpoint about 25 centimetres off the ground, which changes the readability of every space. Corridors become canyons. Furniture becomes terrain. Sightlines shorten, so landmarks move higher, and collision has to be far more forgiving, because a low camera clips through geometry constantly. The invisible boxes doing that work are the ones we explained in how hitboxes work in video games, and a small quadruped stresses them harder than any human character.

Movement is the third constraint. Real cats do not move on a grid or in straight lines, and animators cannot fake it. The reason players call Stray convincing is not fur shading, it is the pause before a jump. Cats also see differently from us, with better motion detection in dim light and worse detail resolution, which we broke down in how cats see the world. Almost no game simulates that, and the idea is sitting there unclaimed.

Finally, structure. Because a cat has no mission, cat games tend to be exploratory rather than goal-driven, closer in shape to the interconnected maps of a metroidvania than to a linear campaign. The animal justifies the wandering. Nobody asks why a cat is on a roof at 3am.

FAQ

What was the first video game with a cat as the main character?

Claiming an absolute first is risky given how many arcade and home-computer titles went undocumented, but Alley Cat (Synapse Software, Atari 8-bit, 1983, DOS port in 1984) is the earliest widely played example of a game where the cat is the player character rather than an enemy or a background element.

Why does Cait Sith have a Scottish accent?

His name comes from the cat-sìth of Scottish and Irish folklore. The original 1997 game had no voice acting, so the accent only appeared in later English localisations, beginning with the 2005 film Advent Children, as a nod to that source.

Is the cat in Stray based on a real animal?

Yes. The protagonist is modelled on Murtaugh, an orange tabby found as a stray in Montpellier by BlueTwelve’s founders, with a second cat, Riggs, also informing the design. A Sphynx named Oscar was the studio’s main animation reference.

Which cat game has sold the most?

Publishers rarely release comparable figures, so ranking is guesswork. The largest documented numbers belong to Stray, at roughly 2.5 million copies and about $57 million on Steam in its first month alone. Cat Quest passed 2.5 million copies across the series by 2022, and Little Kitty, Big City reached over 2 million players on Game Pass in its first months.

Why are cats so common in Japanese games specifically?

Cats occupy an unusual position in Japanese popular culture, from the beckoning maneki-neko to a long tradition of cat spirits in folklore, and mobile and console developers have drawn on that steadily. Neko Atsume and Morgana in Persona 5 are two ends of the same tendency: the cat as a companion that observes human behaviour without being bound by it.

The Cat Won

Forty years separate Freddy climbing a washing line from a nameless orange tabby crossing a dead city. In between, the cat was a mascot that failed, a folklore reference bolted onto a spy robot, a fantasy species retconned into moon phases, and a mobile game that did almost nothing and sold millions. What connects them is that the cat never had to be explained. It just had to move correctly. The studios that understood this made better games than the ones that thought whiskers were enough.

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