Information, History, Trivia about KOTC
King of the Cats was a "Graphical Online World" that operated from 1993 to 1997. It was 100% graphical, using a point-and-click interface. It predated internet graphical worlds, and was one of the first to use avatars in a completely graphical setting. Users took on a cat persona of their choice, and then began to interact with the other cats, storylines, and strange antics. The story was rich and complex, the rules were harsh, and the online cats were - well, fantastic. This site is dedicated to remembering KOTC and them!
What the Press Said about King of the Cats - A page of reviews from Wired, Ziff Davis, and others.
Places at King of the Cats
(not yet comprehensive)
Some of these links will take you to a single image file. The original RIP files have been converted to .jpg or .gif files for
presentation on the web, and the conversion may have required slight alterations from the
original. Some links take you to a page with a series of images and some description.
Ethyl's House:
Living Room
Kitchen
Basement
Bedroom
Atwood's House
Carver's House
Christensen Floral
Elliott's Butcher Shop
Divertimento
The Church
The Rectory
Rocket Gas Station
Engle Memorial Cemetery
Mausoleum
Minert Mortuary
The City Powerstation
City Hall
Whimpernet Terminals
Kennels
Smith, Butler and Winky
Brokerage Services Offices
Train Station (travel to:)
Smoot Valley
Scoop Beach
City Sewer System
The Kit Kat Klub (pool room scene)
The Puss Puss Cafe
The Terminal Bar
City Pound
The Catamount
Heister Park
The Meadows
Gypsy Camp
Hepworth Elementary School
Wendell Museum
Telegraph Point
Roxy Theatre
Naumann Fine Art Gallery
Leishman Tower
RMS Headquarters
Stonehedge
Dr. Parkinson, D.V.M.
Dr. Bombay's Game PreserveStreet Scenes:
Corner of Hepworth and Poe, looking south
Downtown Alley
Strand looking downtown
Try the "walkthrough" from the University of Utah
Activities at King of the Cats (not yet comprehensive)
Unraveling the toilet paper
Eating
Fighting
Emew
Grasshopperation
Three Mice You Blind
Dead Bird Lotto
Chattel
King's Coronation
Sant the Dog
Saturday Parade down Whitman St.
The Catapults (2)
The Dogcatcher
Cats from King of the Cats
(not yet comprehensive)
Links from cat's names will take you to their memoirs. Please share your recollections of KOTC! turk@kingofthecats.net
Turk Nimble Fatcat Velvet Paw Miss Kitty Beatnik Bootsie Flecia Soundman Pyewacket Bagheera Smirk Nikolai
Documents/Products
from King of the Cats (not yet comprehensive)
If you need Acrobat to read the pdf files, it's free. Click here.
Sewer Maps
Ross Parot Training Tapes
How To Speak Dog
CAT101 (html)
City Map (pdf, shows layout of city streets from an old version of CAT101)
You Survived Melioration (pdf, mailed when a cat sucessfully survived Melioration and raised to Level 2)
Mike Richan and Gary "Jake" Jensen conceived King of the Cats as a play off a small story in the introduction of Peter Straub's "Shadowlands." It almost became a play-by-mail role-playing game in the early 1980's. When personal computers arrived, Mike and Gary again sat down to explore the idea. For a while, King of the Cats was developed as a game for the Amiga - but it was never finished, and the ability to interact with other cats was missing. During that time Mike began BBS'ing, and maintained an interest in the hobby as a participant.
Mike moved to Seattle in 1991, and kept up on the BBS scene. When a new way to display pictures over a dial-up connection was invented (RIP) Mike got on the phone to Jake (still living in Salt Lake City) and asked him to fly up right away - it was time to give King of the Cats a real go!
"I never had any interest in running a BBS until it became a way to do King of the Cats," said Mike. "And I was never interested in King of the Cats if we couldn't do it graphically, as a point-and-click world, from the cat perspective. The arrival of RIP changed all that. Of course, had we waited two more years, we'd have done it html."
Mike talked Jake into spending 6 months in Seattle during the fall of 1993, writing programs and designing screens to pull off their design of King of the Cats. They rented an awful but cheap office in Pioneer Square, and spent endless days coding. Without windows in the office it was easy to lose track of time. "What I remember was 107 on the radio and lots of Diet Coke," remembers Mike.
Mike on the software used: "The first task was to make sure we used the right BBS software package as a base. We tried them all. At the time, only Searchlight had implemented RIP fully, so that made a lot of the decision for us, because we always wanted everything to be graphical, our goal was to never see a screen revert to ANSI or text - which at that time was unheard of. Searchlight was also easily manipulated by programs we could write, and was a small, clean package. After deciding on Searchlight, we had to figure out how to imbed RIP into programs. RIP essentially was a text based language that activated graphical elements on the user's terminal. To create the RIP images, however, you had to use a program called RIPaint, which gave you a nice interface to "draw" things. We quickly realized that RIP limitations meant that we weren't going to be able to provide a real-world look and feel to King of the Cats, so Jake designed the "funky cubist" cats that took best advantage of the 16 color limitation of RIP. Soon we had the hang of drawing RIP images with RIPaint, saving the file, opening up the text of the file, extracting the graphical elements we wanted, imbedding the text into programs, and so on. What we were building didn't exist anywhere in the BBS world or even on the internet. The internet had MUD's, but they weren't graphical at that time. It really was ahead of its time, so we gave it a name: Graphical Online World. We learned a great deal."
KOTC went live on February 1, 1994, with one phone line and a small world where users could dial in, create their cat, and explore one building, Ethyl's House. "It took us six months to get Ethyl's house done - but it went much faster from that point on, because we were past a huge learning curve," remembers Mike. "And the users wanted more - always wanted more. They could play out everything we'd build in a matter of hours. It amazes me that we built what we did with just the two of us."
KOTC grew to three lines within a month, and ten lines 90 days later. Soon an entire online city had been created. The streets were named after poets, and the non-playing characters were named after high school acquaintances Mike and Gary shared in the 1970's in Utah.
"It became incredibly complex, and still to this day I've not encountered anything like it. I still get email from old users who say the same thing."
Mike and Jake took on other business opportunities in 1997, and stopped development of King of the Cats. "We considered remaking KOTC for the web, but we had taken jobs and were making money doing other things, so we had to abandon it. We considered making the site available as-is on the internet, which might have worked, but without a freely-distributable client for users to download and use for telnet to KOTC (necessary to intrepret the RIP graphics), it never would have worked. But Jake and I occasionally dream of KOTC either in VRML or still as an html/jpg point-and-click world. Who knows."
Technical Information
King of the Cats was five years ahead of it's time...it was before the
web was emerging as the way to interact with people.
KOTC was a 10-line dial-up BBS using Searchlight software and a full
implementation of RIP (Remote Imaging Protocol) graphics. Users downloaded the
"RIPterm" client and used it to dial-in.
Although the base Searchlight
BBS system supported RIP graphics for features
like email, conferences, and other BBS-type
stuff, to create the King of the Cats world,
Mike Richan and Gary Jensen spent years writing
"doors" (essentially programs)
that made a seamless "point of view"
experience for the user, with a very complex
role-playing game/scoring system. By the
end of KOTC's life, there were almost 1000
doors, and over 3000 RIP files (graphic scenes),
all of which were built by hand. Because
of this, so far as we know, King of the Cats
was the most heavily customized Searchlight
BBS ever created. Our own custom programs
used the Searchlight chat features, for example,
to create our own unique chat areas (We didn't
use the supplied BBS chat program or "Fred"
- they didn't have the appropriate cat graphics
and atmosphere we needed to keep things seamless.)
We would also "trigger" sound effects
and RIP graphics using the chat system -
this allowed users to interact in interesting
ways. Now, of course, this is done routinely,
but back then it was innovative.
KOTC initially ran as a one line BBS on a 486/33 with 8mb RAM and 400
mb HD. At the end, it was running ten lines, with a digiboard, on a Pentium 166 with 32mb
of RAM and a 1 gig hard drive (and ooo, we thought that was fast at the time.)
Mike Richan (known as "Turk" online) used regular 'ol Basic to write doors, and constructed most of the games and activities. Some of his creations include "Three Mice You Blind," "Dead Bird Lotto," "Sea Monkeys," "Grasshopperation," the "Catapult, "and "Beachcombing." His most inane creation was "Yarn," still considered to this day to be one of the most mesmerizing and boring activities ever devised. His favorite creation was the Bumper Car ride at the amusement park "Divertimento."
Gary "Jake" Jensen (known as "Fatcat" online) used Turbo Pascal to write doors that interacted directly with the BBS software. Some of Jake's contributions to the online world included the "Cat Creation Process", the "Kit Kat Klub" and "Puss Puss Cafe" (our custom chat areas) and Ethyl's kitchen. We feel it was the "cat creation" graphics, where you pick your cat breed, sex, etc. that won us the quote from Wired.
Both Mike and Gary consider their years spent on KOTC as some of the best of their lives.
| Turk: | Fatcat: | ||
| turk@kingofthecats.net | fatcat@kingofthecats.net |
"RIPterm",
"RIP", "Remote Imaging Protocol" and "Searchlight BBS" are
all owned by Telegrafix Inc.
All materials at this site Copyright 1993-1997
by QCOM.
