How It Began...

Sometime around the year 2000, a middle school classmate let me borrow his copy of Catz.

I'd spent my late childhood fascinated by portable digital pets like Tamagotchi and Raku Raku Dinokun, and 1999 had brought us the Sega Dreamcast's mindblowing feature of raising adorable creatures in the first Sonic Adventure both in-game and on the console's portable VMU. Despite these advancements in toys and video games, however, the only similar things I'd seen up to that point on PCs were websites like Neopets and some lightweight Windows freeware programs that spawned desktop-roaming animals (mine was a sheep). Our dialup internet at home wasn't fast enough for the former and there wasn't much interactivity to the latter, so I relied on my gadgets and cartridges for my caretaking fix.

But then there was Petz. And Petz was a revelation.

I spent a few weeks with Catz before I returned my friend's disc and uninstalled the game. I remember thinking, man, I wish there was a version of this with dogs in it! Little did I know that Dogz did in fact exist, and that a few months later my mom and I would stumble across it while browsing around a Circuit City or CompUSA. I don't remember the actual moment of finding it, but in all honesty, I probably freaked out.

It's a shame that most of that shopping trip's details are lost to me now, but the memories of selecting my first pet in the game's Adoption Center are still vivd. After much deliberation, on May 21st, 2001, I chose a great dane puppy and named him Tambo. I've been raising him and his family ever since.

Finding the Petz Community

Although I lurked on many players' Kennelz and Catteriez (Catteryz?) back in the day, I never made my own Petz website. I'm not sure why, as by 2001 I'd already been dabbling in HTML and had built fanpages for things like Sailor Moon, the Powerpuff Girls, and the Ninja Turtles. Alas, this oversight meant that the opportunity to join the Petz community in its heyday would pass me by, and beyond submitting the occasional heartfelt adoption survey to someone hosting their litterz on Geocities or Angelfire, I had no contact with other players.

Flash forward to some random afternoon in 2006. Twenty years old, home on summer break from college, and still frustrated that I could still only play Dogz 4 on my family's original Windows 98 desktop in the basement (if you never experienced this problem, the game ran unplayably fast on the then-current Windows XP operating system), a desperate internet search eventually led me to links for Sherlock Software's PetA tool. This add-on, among other things, allowed for adjustments to gameplay speed -- and just like that, my dogz were finally able to join me on my school laptop, my mom could recycle that decade-old Hewlett-Packard PC she'd kept hooked up as my dedicated Petz machine (love you, Mom!), and everyone was elated.

It's very possible that the PetzA links I found that summer had come from posts on The RKC Forum, a Petz message board whose daily activity even years later in 2014 made me do a double-take. It continues to be active today, as do forums like Whiskerwick and Duke's Group. And with Discord servers regularly popping up for everything from showing to modding these days, it seems it's never too late to become a full-blown member of the Petz community.

And Now I'm a Grown-Up

Many Petz veterans you'll talk to have gone on to become graphics artists or web designers. Clearly I have not, lol. I charted my path instead towards information technology, librarianship, and knowledge management.

Like a lot of players, I often return to Petz in times of sadness or stress. There's something truly wonderful about spending time with a digital creature who's been a part of your life since your early teens. As evidenced by the flood of new members to the RKC forum at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Petz is a powerful refuge.

Only recently have I branched out into other gameplay styles and created my first few selective breeds, taking my love of the game's complex genetics system to a new level -- and after all these years, I finally have my website! It's amazing to me how this CD-ROM from the 90s continues to inspire its players to create, play, and share.