Garfield — a hero built around not moving

A comic strip about a cat whose defining trait is refusing to move is a strange fit for an action game, and the history of Garfield in software is mostly a record of designers working around that problem. Jim Davis has been drawing the strip since 1978; the games arrived in two clearly separated waves, and they solved the puzzle in opposite ways.

The first wave belonged to home computers. Garfield: Big Fat Hairy Deal moves at a deliberate crawl: you wander a town, pick things up and work out which object unlocks which situation, closer to an adventure than to a platformer. It suits the character, but it also means nothing about it feels urgent.

Sega's way around the problem

Years later Garfield: Caught in the Act found the trick: drop the cat inside a television set, and every stage becomes a parody of a different kind of show — a horror set, a western, a space serial. Now there is a reason to run and jump, because he is trying to get out. Around it sit oddities like the Japan-only Famicom release A Week of Garfield, which never reached Europe or America at the time, and handheld licences such as The Search for Pooky and Garfield and His Nine Lives, built to match whatever cartoon or film was current.

Two things here start straight in the browser: Caught in the Act, and Create with Garfield — which is not a game at all but a strip-building tool with ready-made panels, poses and captions. Everything else in the list is a catalogue profile with a description and screenshots.