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At night, the staircase is riddled with cats. They're everywhere: mewling, pacing, slumped in those peculiar elbowy puddles that only cats can form. One of them - my favourite one - walks back and forth along the banister with an imperious tilt to the head. This guy's special, I think. Sure, he's a pale ginger like all the others, but now and then he flashes a luminous, rather lurid, orange.Over the last few months, I've spent a lot of time with this magical cat. I've watched him, prodded him, tried to figure him out. Is he sending me a message in neat little bursts of colourful morse code? Is he briefly transforming into an interactive object? Is he highlighting something that's buried, something that's only there to be found by cat fans with a worrying amount of free time on their hands?
Eventually, I emailed Brendon Chung, the creator of the cat, and the staircase, and Thirty Flights of Loving, the game that houses them both. He explained that the sudden bright orange flash is down to a quirk of the Quake 2 engine he's been working with: something to do with radiosity and a patch of light that hits the railing the cat stands on. It's not a feature as such, just a bug. Just a bug that looks like a feature.
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