Games For Cats
Read the story- Brand
- Friskies
- Year
- 2011
- Objective
- Engagement
- Industry
- Other
- Mechanic
- Arcade & Action
- Platform
- Web
- Agency
- Agency: GALLEGOS United
Objective
Friskies wanted content in the internet's most reliable traffic magnet — cats being funny — instead of another coupon or Facebook post, and a way to own the "playful, tech-savvy" cat brand. Product manager Sean Belonjie put it plainly: whatever the brand made had to be something owners couldn't get anywhere else. A game people couldn't find anywhere but Friskies also meant owners filming their cats playing it and posting the video themselves.
Solution
You prop an iPad or Android tablet flat on the floor, open gamesforcats.com, and hand the screen to the cat. In Cat Fishing, fish glide across the glass for a paw to chase and pin down; Tasty Treasures Hunt scatters pieces of Friskies food for the cat to swipe into view; Party Mix-Up sends chicken, cheese and kibble shapes skittering away from every swat. There's no score to read or timer to beat — a round just runs as long as the cat keeps hunting, while the owner films from the couch. In You vs. Cat, the tablet splits the action so a human and a cat chase targets on the same screen at once, and each match's result feeds a live worldwide leaderboard tracking cats against people.
Results
Friskies' games passed 500,000 downloads and more than 500,000 plays of the first titles alone within a year of launch. Owners submitted roughly 300,000 videos of their cats playing to the Youvscat.com hub, and the global cats-vs-humans leaderboard it fed reached 5.3 million points for cats against 4.6 million for people. On launch day alone, You vs. Cat drew 13,000 Facebook likes and 2,545 tweets, with cats already ahead 382,000 to 309,000 on the leaderboard by the next afternoon. A 2013 open hackathon for the next game in the series drew more than 50 developers competing for a $15,000 top prize. Cat Fishing 2 alone has since passed 1 million downloads on Google Play and holds 18,000 ratings at 4.5 out of 5 on the App Store.
- 1
The player opens gamesforcats.com on an iPad or Android tablet — no app install required — and picks one of three games: Cat Fishing, Tasty Treasures Hunt, or Party Mix-Up. All three share one action: bright objects crawl or swim across the screen for a cat to paw at, and the touchscreen reads a paw pad the same way it reads a human finger. The owner sets the tablet flat near the cat and taps PLAY, handing control over to the cat.
- 2
In Cat Fishing a single fish swims in a pond and scores when the cat paws it; Tasty Treasures Hunt swaps the fish for animated chicken, turkey, cheese and fish representing Friskies ingredients; Party Mix-Up scatters cartoon Friskies Party Mix treats across the screen. All three run the same catch-with-a-paw loop under a different skin.
- 3
Difficulty in Cat Fishing escalates with success: catching fish brings a second and then a third fish onto the screen at once, up to three, while their swimming speed increases.
- 4
If the cat goes 30 seconds without touching the screen, the game meows on its own to pull its attention back.
- 5
Tapping a fish icon in the corner opens a choice of 10 fish-and-pond skins, which a reset button then applies.
- 6
JitterBug replaces the swimming prey with crawling bugs and times five 15-second rounds for the cat to swat as many as possible, alongside an endless mode with no timer.
- 7
Happy Wings, added March 2013, sets the action in an "electronic garden" where life-size hummingbirds, a moth and a dragonfly flit across the screen; three rounds of rising speed throw multiple targets at once and the session closes on a "You Won" screen.
- 8
You vs. Cat, launched March 2012, splits the tablet between a human and a cat on opposite sides: the human flicks up to five pieces of Friskies food at once toward a goal on the cat's side, the cat tries to paw each piece out of the air before it lands, a goal scores the human 10 points, an interception scores the cat 10, and the match runs to 50.
- 9
Match results feed a live global leaderboard at youvscat.com, tracking cats against humans in real time.
- 10
Owners film their cat's session and upload it to youvscat.com, where clips can surface on the site and the Friskies Facebook page alongside shared high scores, and the game closes by suggesting a real Friskies treat as an offline reward.
