But I think there were sheep, dancing babies (ugh!!), something like Bonzi Buddy rings a bell (I once had to clean something named that off a colleague’s workstation when he reported it thinking it was malware).
There was also toys like this on Linux and Unix too. Most famously xeyes.
I miss the playful era when things like this and novelty screensavers were “cool”.
But if you read the description of its spyware behaviour from a current perspective, it's not that different from the telemetry that’s implemented everywhere and Windows bugging you to use Bing as a search engine.
XRoach was a favourite to run on someone who left their machine unlocked (or their XServer display unprotected) - it makes cockroaches that hide underneath windows, so you only see them when you move or close a window. Then they all scuttled around and hid under other ones!
Ooh, Neko was 1989 - I'm not sure when I first saw the Lunar-Lander game on the Amiga that had a similar mechanism, but it would have been around then.
Gravity vs thrust, with left + right controls, the idea was to carefully land on any of the windows on your desktop.
Analogous to breaking the fourth wall, in a way.
I still recall the scrolling message in that game -- Space is big, Space is dark, It's hard to find, a place to park.
I ran something called Dogz [1] which was a pretty advanced dog simulator. You could train the dog to perform tricks or punish it if it did something you didn't like. They claimed to use AI and it worked very well although I don't know how much much was placebo. In any case, I remember it as being well ahead of its time.
On X11 systems there were also things like xsnow, with snow piling up on your window borders and santa flying in the background. xlemmings, walking/falling on your windows and various variations on this. Xeyes is the 'biggest' or most famous one, but in early linux distro's there were various of these things in the 'games' sections.
There was also an application that took a screenshot of your current desktop and then gave you a bunch of weapons - bats, guns, bombs - and allowed you to smash it to pieces.
Small story, friend of mine had a malware package, it needed a backdoor installed; he had a tool to merge the backdoor with any other application, so he used a cute desktop sheep thing. I put it on my parents' computer, then could have the client on my side instruct it to take and send screenshots.
We also set it up at school (IT degree) on the shared computers, but I think a sysadmin found out. We didn't get in trouble, but a classmate was caught and nearly expelled.
There was also this desktop program where you would choose from different weapons, I don't remember for which purpose... anyone knows what I'm talking about?
But I think there were sheep, dancing babies (ugh!!), something like Bonzi Buddy rings a bell (I once had to clean something named that off a colleague’s workstation when he reported it thinking it was malware).
There was also toys like this on Linux and Unix too. Most famously xeyes.
I miss the playful era when things like this and novelty screensavers were “cool”.