Meow Mart
Open the game- Brand
- Mailchimp
- Year
- 2020
- Objective
- Engagement
- Industry
- Tech & Telecom
- Mechanic
- Arcade & Action
- Platform
- Web
Objective
Mailchimp built Meow Mart for the small-business owners who make up its customer base, not to pitch its own product. The idea was to hand that audience a few minutes of relief from the grind of running a shop, using humor instead of a sales pitch to earn goodwill.
Solution
You land on the game as a cat running a small corner store, shown around your bed, your outfit options, and a vending machine that's gone haywire. From there it's straight into the arcade loop: dodge the flaming snacks the broken machine hurls at you, patch it up, and scoop up coins as they scatter across the shop. Coins go toward new outfits and hats for your cat, so each run leaves you a little more decked out for the next one. The whole thing runs full-screen in the browser with its own retro-illustrated look, music, and sound effects, and the same loop is available to carry around as an iOS or Android app.
- 1
Meow Mart loads directly in the browser at its own subdomain, no install or account needed. Its premise casts the player as a cat living in a corner store whose vending machine has gone haywire and pelts it with snacks; a hand-drawn title screen shows the storefront with a manifesto line, and a single door button leads in through an animated wipe transition.
- 2
A briefing screen frames each round on a CCTV-style monitor: it previews the scene, states the goal (survive three waves and knock out the machine's emergency switch), shows the movement and jump controls, and offers a play button alongside options to browse other rounds or head to a cosmetic shop.
- 3
A round opens in a single store aisle viewed from behind the cat, with a heads-up display tracking three lives and a coin count. The player's first task is walking to the vending machine and jumping to strike its glowing emergency-off button, which sets the wave in motion.
- 4
Once triggered, the machine launches snack items down multiple lanes while spitting out coins; the player dodges by moving left and right and jumping, collecting coins on the run, and loses a life on any hit as the barrage grows denser and harder to thread.
- 5
Losing a life knocks the cat back to the start of the aisle rather than ending the round, and the same wave continues with the lives that remain.
- 6
Between waves the player returns to hit the emergency switch again, with the machine's face flipping from sad to angry as a tell before it fires; each new wave swaps in a different projectile type, adding overhead hazards alongside ground-level ones.
- 7
Clearing all three waves and disabling the machine pays out a fixed coin reward.
- 8
Coins earned in rounds are spent in a separate shop on outfits and hats for the cat, purely cosmetic.
- 9
The game sits inside a broader hub of Mailchimp-made games alongside two sister titles and promotes a newsletter signup; a companion mobile app once offered the same loop on iOS and Android.
