Ancient Web: Robotfindskitten Turned an ASCII Joke Into a Platform Epidemic

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

You are a robot. Somewhere in a field of symbols there is a kitten. Find the kitten. That is essentially the entire premise of robotfindskitten, and programmers have spent years making sure it runs on far more machines than such a premise seems to require.

Visit the robotfindskitten website.

Leonard Richardson wrote the original DOS game in 1997 and later a Linux version. The home page itself resembles a text terminal, complete with borders made of characters, a robot represented by a number sign, and a little ASCII kitten.

Everything else is not kitten

The field contains numerous other objects represented by punctuation, letters, and numbers. When the robot approaches something, the game identifies it. Usually the object is something other than the desired kitten, accompanied by an absurd description.

This replaces familiar gaming objectives with a very gentle one. There is no need for a weapon, score counter, or elaborate graphics. You move until the one required encounter happens.

Richardson's own retrospective in 2017 explains that he recovered original DOS binaries and source code from the first version. The site also maintains source information and an archive of subsequent implementations.

The ports directory is where the project becomes especially strange. It lists versions or reimplementations for Palm OS, Dreamcast, Commodore 64, Apple II, Game Boy Advance, the Atari 2600, Amiga, Nintendo DS, Rockbox, and even Lego Mindstorms NXT, among many others.

Some of these are faithful ports; others are inspired reinventions. The website itself warns readers not to treat every listed adaptation as sharing the same code.

A silly idea becomes shared computing culture

The game's modest requirements made it a kind of informal programming challenge. Translating it to a machine with a completely different display, controls, or memory limitations was half the attraction.

The 2009 robotfindskitten standard document treats the concept with tongue-in-cheek technical seriousness. A joke with a formal specification is already something more than a joke.

This archive is valuable because it keeps not only the result but the generations of people who chose to adapt it. Software history tends to celebrate ever-greater complexity. Here is a counterexample: an almost comically small idea moving between machines because people wanted it to.

Explore the software ports and original source links.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.