The Many Programs Within Giga Pets

Would you believe it if I told you that there are currently four different programs that can appear inside a Giga Pet? Four that we know of in fact!

It has been common knowledge for a long time that Giga Pets started out with Playmates’ “Nano Pet” programming, probably purchased from them and used while they developed their own program.

What hasn’t been very well known is the fact that there were at least two intermediate programs before Giga Pets finally settled on their most commonly seen “health” based program.
To give you an idea of exactly which program I’m talking about, the stats/score screens look like this image to the left here.

The pet itself does not live in a pixelated background like Nano Pets do, most of the time it stays still in the middle of the screen but randomly performs tricks.

For consistency, I’m going to refer to this program as “Giga Pet Version 2”. Now let’s take a look at each program in detail!

Nano Pet Program
The Nano pet program is very distinctive, having a black coloured pet on the screen which is always moving around in some way and also has a pixel background, usually a house or garden setting.
When you feed Nano pets they make a sound, when you make them happy there is usually a sun shining animation in the background.
Last but not least when checking on the stats or health of a pet, there is usually a set of hearts which need to be filled (sometimes a numerical system from 0 to 99).
The Compu Kitty and Digital Doggie were exact copies of this program from Playmates so it’s easy to tell if you have one.
Other pets such as the T-rex and Alien also have this exact program but with their own animations.
They also all have the exact same sound as the original Nano Pets (there are newer Nano models with different sounds).

Nano Pet and Giga Pet Crossover Program
Hopefully this won’t be too confusing but this program behaves like a Nano pet, sounds like one of the newer Nano pet models but looks like a Giga Pet program with Nano Pet animations!!
It’s supposedly tricky to care for. The easiest way to tell if you have one is to just compare it to a Nano Pet. It’ll look very different but it’ll still have a background that it moves around in like a Nano Pet.
This version appeared in KFC’s promotional Giga Pets.

Giga Pet Version 1 Program
This program appears to look identical to “Version 2” (which is the most common Giga Pet program) however the scoring system works differently. There is no Discipline at all and the images for all the other scores are different to that of “Version 2”. They’re bigger and as a result there is only one score per screen.
Because of the scoring system being different to Version 2, this version also plays somewhat differently to it. The rules in “Compu Kitty Comprehensive Guide” do not apply here even though at first glance of the pet, you would assume they did.

Giga Pet Version 2 Program
This is the most common and most recent of the Giga Pet programs; Version 2 is iconic.
When people remember Giga Pets they mostly remember this. There is a full scoring system with Health, Hunger, Happiness and Discipline. As described previously, the pet lives in the middle of the screen for the most part but randomly performs tricks as well. There isn’t a pixelated background unless the trick requires it.
More information about exactly how this type of program functions can be found in this comprehensive guide. It’ll work for any of the Giga Pets with a Version 2 program but none of the older ones.
This program is complex and perhaps the most difficult to master, because of this Giga Pets had a reputation of being too hard for beginners back when they were released.
This program appeared in KFC’s promotional Giga Pets.