1996 PixelHazard
Platform: PC (DOS)
CatGun: Victory Mission G was a manga-style shoot-em’-up game developed around 1995-1996 by the game developer duo PixelHazard (consisting of programmer Arjen Wagenaar and artist Luc S. Verhulst, who both formerly worked for the game company The Vision Factory/SPC Vision specializing in games for the Philips CD-i). The music was composed by the musician duo E * Que/Logic Audio Music Production as they were known at the time (Hans Ouwejan and Felix Faassen).
The plot for the game went as follows:
Deep in the inner regions of the Cat’s Eye nebula, the dark troops of EvilNeko, former CATFleet commander, have taken over a peaceful planet. Orbiting the planet are five moons. EvilNeko has installed factories on the surface of the moons that extract their natural resources in order to build giant Destroyer Ships for his final offensive against CATFleet.
Welcome to CATFleet’s special elite force, the Cute Assault Team! Help Nekomi (telepath), Okane (mercenary), Miko (feline), RX7 (clone) and Wazu (android) with their fight against EvilNeko. Each CAT member has its own powerful, custom-designed weapon, the CATGUN. Use the CATGUN to free the dominated moons and their inhabitants. Go to the planet’s surface and fight your way through to EvilNeko’s base for the final battle. CATGUN ‘Victory Mission G’ – Join the team!
According to Hans, the game was presented at an unknown game developers conference in London in early 1996 and got the attention of the UK subsidiary of Philips Interactive, who then signed a distribution deal with PixelHazard. Unfortunately that subsidiary apparently ceased to exist as a result of reorganizations at Philips, and development on CatGun was halted as a result.
There are two publicly-available builds of CatGun. The first one is an unplayable demonstration build built in January 1996 showcasing one level of each stage in the game (presumably to be shown at the aforementioned conference). The second one is a farther-along build from April 1996, with 7 playable levels (including 2 boss levels) and 4 unplayable “demo” ones.
There are screenshots which can be found in a CDinteractive.co.uk thread about the game of a third build presumably way farther along than the April 1996 build (there are quite a few new things present in those screenshots that are nowhere to be seen in the build), but it has unfortunately not resurfaced as of yet.
Downloads
Video
Sources
- https://gyrominiac.nekoweb.org/catgun.html
- https://web.archive.org/web/20071130165538/http://www.eque.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=12&Itemid=26
- https://web.archive.org/web/20250523110625/https://www.cdinteractive.co.uk/forums/cdinteractive/viewtopic.php?t=847
- https://web.archive.org/web/20260325225032/https://cdidev.tripod.com/catgun.htm
- https://www.old-games.ru/game/screenshots/13305.html
Gallery
A colorful cotton-candy dream world.
is the same developer who made The Apprentice for the CD-i?
(Iwonder of this game would have had gidden naked anime girls in it too?) :D
It is by some of the same people that used to work at the Vision Factory :)
Only the same artist, yeah.
There already are naked anime girls, present as environment sprites in a couple of the levels :-D I’d imagine they obviously would have gotten rid of them in the final game, if only they actually got to finish it…
(P.S. your videos rock, had a blast watching them a while back!)