Cat Bowling

What can I say about Cat Bowling? I guess if there is going to be proof that I ever existed on Earth, this may be it.

See the game in action

The setup

While at Bravo Zulu, Brian Piana and I came up with an idea for a halloween game: “Wouldn’t it be fun to throw a pumpkin at some cats?” Sure it would. And thus began Cat Bowling. Brian whipped up some fantastic artwork and I did my best to keep pace on the programming end of things, using Flash 5 Actionscript.

The launch

September, 2002. Cat Bowling was featured in the inaugural issue of the Bravo Zulu e-mail newsletter. Being the first issue, there was no huge mailing list. Friends, family and colleagues – that was about it.

The circulation

Now remember, Digg.com wasn’t around in these days. This was good ol’ e-mail forwarding. In mere weeks of circulation, the game exploded to over 30,000 unique visits on Halloween Day, 2002 and was featured as TechTV’s Site of the Day. Halloween, 2006 and a search for “cat bowling” on google returned over 100,000 results.

The wrap-up and lessons learned

Luckily, I was working with a talented artist on this project. It’s amazing the impact that quality artwork has on the programming — it really drives you to step up your game. If I were to do it all over again, I would include a high score board; I saw many forums where people were posting screenshots of their scores.

As mentioned, the popularity caught us off guard, so one thing that was not considered during development was the illegal hosting of the game on other servers. It has been copied countless number of times and hosted on sites that generate income from ad revenue.

Ultimately, this game provided Bravo Zulu with more traffic than we could have imagined. The programming challenges involved made me a better developer as well. Looking back, could the code have been better? Absolutely; I believe there is always room for improvement. Could the physics involved have been more realistic? No; they’re cats!