Robotfindskitten is a program with a history. Originally written in DOS in 1997 for an online contest, RFK was in fact the only entry for that contest. RFK would have likely faded into obscurity had it not been re-written for Linux in 1999. Once available for Linux its fame and fan base spread. You can read more about the programs history, its fan base, and see other ports that are available at http://www.robotfindskitten.org.

RFK is a Zen simulation. There are no points to gain, nothing to achieve. You are a robot and you are trying to find a kitten. There are many things around which are not kitten and apparently you are unable to distinguish visually between them so you are left to analyze several non-kitten objects before finding your goal. What really makes the game, tho, is the myriad of quirky descriptions of non-kitten things that you could run into. This version reads from an external file called messages.txt for its descriptions, but if messages.txt is unavailable it will use a stock of 25 messages preloaded into the code, tho it’s not the same.

Robot Finds Kitten is modified from Leonard Richardson’s (leonardr@segfault.org) original code by Joseph Larson.