Garfield: Caught in the Act

Garfield: Caught in the Act arrived in 1995 under the Sega of America banner and belongs to the licensed platformers that filled the Mega Drive library during the final third of its life. The catalogue lists it as a single-player title with a platform perspective, the genre the 16-bit Sega machine had been built around from day one.

The release year matters here. By the mid-nineties the Mega Drive was facing the first 32-bit consoles, and studios were pushing the familiar hardware as far as it would go: large colourful sprites, layered backgrounds and animation that paid attention to how a character carries itself. With a comic licence that detail decides everything, because players immediately notice whether the figure on screen moves like the original or merely wears its face.

Garfield as a property already had years of newspaper strips and television behind it, so the game targeted an audience that knew the character long before picking up a controller. Licensed platformers were published by the dozen in that period, and what separated them was how much care went into animation and level layout rather than into the artwork on the box.

Its place in the Garfield series shows this was not an isolated experiment but one entry in a wider line of games built around the character across several systems. Anyone digging through the Mega Drive back catalogue today will meet it as a representative sample of the console's later years.

OldGame.cz lets you start this one directly in the browser, and the entry also carries the release year, the publisher and screenshots.