Mystery God

Mystery God is a comic novelty application from Naked Rabbit (Los Angeles) that parodies the 1960s board game Mystery Date. Instead of opening the door on a potential boyfriend, players are randomly assigned one of several deities by their spiritual guide, Steve the Cat, and rated on whether their god is a Dream or a Dud.

The Premise

The author riffs directly on Mystery Date, the Milton Bradley board game in which players hoped the figure behind the door would be the Dream rather than the Dud. Mystery God applies the same conceit to religion: "some gods are dreams, and some are definitely duds." Each click of the door reveals a randomly assigned Mystery God, drawn from a pool of fascinating deities.

Steve the Cat, Spiritual Guide

Players are led through the experience by Steve the Cat, the program's narrator and self-styled spiritual guide. The tone is firmly comedic and irreverent, marketed by Naked Rabbit as "an exciting application which allows you to be randomly assigned one of several fascinating deities," with promises that the player's pulse will quicken as the door swings open.

Naked Rabbit House Style

Mystery God fits Naked Rabbit's broader catalog of small humorous Mac applications distributed in the late 1990s through Info-Mac. Like other Naked Rabbit titles, it ships as a self-extracting archive and explicitly requires "a sense of humor" alongside its hardware needs.

System Requirements

All Naked Rabbit programs need at least 4 MB of RAM, a 256-color display and the aforementioned sense of humor. The studio operated out of P.O. Box 36673 in Los Angeles and reached users via loop.com/~nakedrabbit.