Rat Attack!

In single-player mode a single Scratch Cat enters a room, from its walls pours an endless supply of rats. The player must catch and eliminate a certain number of these before a door will appear taking them to the next room. Each area has several rooms, in its particular theme.

The object of the game is to clear each level of the allotted number of rats and continue on to the next room. The player uses a loop-like lasso called an 'Eraticator' to catch the rats. With them trapped the player then must take the rats to the 'Destructor Pad', located in each of the rat-filled rooms, to dispose of them. If the player is bumped by a rat or other damaging item in the room, the rats can escape the trap until they've been eliminated by the 'Destructor'.

A pair of lab rats, Washington and Jefferson, were sent into space aboard a rocket in an experiment. However, after some incident in space, the rats had been mutated and gained super-intelligence. Over forty years on, they have returned to earth and immediately commenced with plans for world domination, amassing a huge army of rats with instructions to destroy everything in sight.

The felines of the world band together to combat this menace forming a group called the 'Scratch Cats'. Headed by cat genius Professor Rex Julius, they fight off these rats with several of his inventions which eliminate the rats in a humane way.

The game was developed by Pure Entertainment, a company founded in April 1996. The title took several years to be fully developed. During this time it was given different temporary names such as "Rat", "Cats & Rats", before finally settling on Rat Attack. While the game was still in development, early versions of the game were sent to news media resulting in early development screenshots of levels not included in the game.

A series of six animated Flash videos were also produced, each telling the story of one of the 'Scratch Cats'. Shortly before the game's release, an early development version was released as a demo for Official UK PlayStation Magazine.

The Nintendo 64 version received mixed reviews, while the PlayStation version received unfavourable reviews, according to the review aggregation website GameRankings. N64 Magazine said that the N64 version was a "Simple, well executed puzzle-em-up, with cats trying to catch rats." Fran Mirabella III of IGN described the gameplay and premise of catching rats and disposing of them as being similar to Ghostbusters. Mirabella compared the camera of the game to a yo-yo, in that "the camera hangs overhead bobbing and swinging about."

He criticized the game's music, saying "The composers must have literally created about 25 seconds of MIDI audio and looped it", and disapproved of the game's graphics, saying that "character models suck badly" and "Even the title screen has a horrible eye-burning font and sloppy art." S. version was still in development.