How to play Cat Trax online
- Move the cat: arrow keys
- Start a new game: F12 (the console’s Reset switch)
- Pause: F2 (the console’s Colour/B&W switch)
- Save and load your progress: Ctrl + 0–9 saves to a slot, Alt + 0–9 loads it
Gameplay
Your goal is to eat all the catnip in the maze while three dogs chase you. Now and then a potion appears at a random spot. Grab it and the cat turns into a dogcatcher for a short time, so you can catch the dogs and send them back to the doghouse at the top of the screen. Bonus fruit also shows up in the centre of the maze for extra points. The random potion makes it feel closer to Mouse Trap than to Pac-Man’s fixed power pellets.
One unusual detail: you can pause the game at any time with the Colour/B&W switch. Atari did not start adding a pause feature like this to its own 2600 games until 1986.
The story behind Cat Trax
UA Limited made games for the Emerson Arcadia 2001, a little-known 1982 console that did better abroad, through many clones, than in the USA. One of them was Crazy Gobbler, an unlicensed Pac-Man clone. When UA decided to bring its Arcadia games to the 2600, it reworked this one to avoid legal trouble with Atari: Pac-Man became a cat, the ghosts became dogs and the power pellets became a potion. The programmer is not known.
Why UA’s 2600 games were cancelled is not documented. The only way American players could have seen Cat Trax at the time was on specially marked units of the Video Game Brain, a cartridge-switching accessory with the game built into one of its slots. The game was first found on a European pirate multi-cart under another name, which is how collectors learned it was a lost prototype. Two pre-production copies later turned up, one complete with box and manual, apparently made to show to retailers.
