In 1993, Bill Clinton became the 42nd president of the United States, and he was a breath of fresh air compared to George Bush, his predecessor: he played the saxophone, made jokes, was not yet 50 years old, and had an incredible approval rating, even despite his scandal with Monica Lewinsky, which made headlines around the world. However, in the early days of his presidency, before all that, the general public was talking about something very different: the president’s cat, Socks. What can you say, there was no TikTok, so people had to find ways to have fun.
A Jazz Cat
It is said that cats decide who their future owner will be, and the case of Socks is paradigmatic: in 1991, when the cat was two years old, he jumped into the arms of Chelsea Clinton while living in Little Rock, and immediately fell in love with her. He was a cat born for glory from his very name, which came from the novel Socks, by Beverly Cleary, in which the protagonist must face the arrival of a baby in his home. This is something that did not happen to the Clinton’s cat, who, two years after being adopted, went to live in the very White House with the family. Finally, a hut worthy of a cat.
Socks had his own animated version on the White House website, attended all kinds of inaugurations, was the co-star of Hillary Clinton’s book Dear Socks, Dear Buddy, had his own comic (Socks goes to Washington), had his own Muppet interviewed by Kermit, and even starred in an episode of Murphy Brown about his supposed disappearance. In the mid-90s, in the United States, Socks became an overnight pop culture star.
And, of course, how could a star survive in the 90s without its own video game for Super Nintendo and Mega Drive? Done and done: Realtime Associates, which had made games like Beavis and Butthead or Captain America and the Avengers, got to work to create Socks the Cat Rocks the Hill, with the aforementioned cat as the absolute protagonist in a classic platformer of the time. In the game, Socks had to warn the Clinton family about the theft of the device to launch a nuclear missile, and to do this, he traversed all of Washington among politicians, journalists, spies, and much more. Even Nintendo, which hated to include politics in its games, ended up accepting it! So, what happened?
Socks the Cat Rocks the Hill was practically finished, with 11 levels already designed and the boss fights (other politicians and even the pets of other presidents) more than thought out. And at that moment, Kaneko, who was going to distribute the game in the United States, closed its offices in the country, forcing the cancellation of finished titles like this one or Fido Dido. And the game, despite already having some reviews from specialized media, disappeared… until 2011, when a private collector, Jason Wilson, bought the prototype and showcased it on YouTube. The game changed hands until it reached Tom Curtin, who decided to launch it via Kickstarter: on February 1, 2018, finally, everyone who wanted to could play one of those cursed video games that no one believed really existed.
You may be wondering what happened to the real Socks, and his ending is not so fun: as he did not get along with Buddy, the family dog, when it was time to move out of the White House to make way for the next president (George W. Bush), the Clintons left the cat with their secretary, Betty Curie, who took him to her home in Maryland where he lived with her husband until 2009, when he died of cancer at the age of twenty. Twenty years! Sadly, Socks had already ceased to be a cultural icon by then, but at least he will always be immortalized as bits on a screen. Meow a stone.