VG Cats

VG Cats
Logo with the two main characters, Leo (left) and Aeris (right)
Author(s)	Scott Ramsoomair
Website	http://www.vgcats.com/
Launch date	September 1, 2001
Genre(s)	Video game, parody

VG Cats (short for Video Game Cats) is a webcomic written and drawn by Canadian cartoonist Scott Ramsoomair. Published on its own website, it features the adventures of a pair of anthropomorphic cats, who often play the roles of characters in popular video games that are parodied in the strip. Strips are usually presented in a large format and in full color. The author generally set Mondays as days for updating the comic; however, the update schedule has a reputation of being incredibly sporadic; he frequently mocks his tardiness in updating in various strips due to personal reasons and frequent convention appearances. As of October 2016, the site had approximately 369 comics listed in its main archives. Based on this archive alone, VG Cats averaged 25 comics a year while it was at its peak.

The VG Cats website also hosts Adventure Log, a Final Fantasy XI webcomic written and drawn by Ramsoomair, and Super Effective, a webcomic parody of the Pokémon game series. Adventure Log has not been updated since 2008.

The comic series often includes video game-based humor and satire targeting the video game industry.

Ramsoomair said that he began the strip due to boredom at work; he created comics during his lunch breaks. The first VG Cats strip was released on September 1, 2001. (His answer on the FAQ page said it was bad timing, probably in reference to the September 11 attacks that happened that same month) Prior to taking the VGCats.com domain, the comic was hosted at www.vgcats.cjb.net. For a period, VG Cats was affiliated with BuzzComix. During April 1 (April Fools' Day), Ramsoomair replaces the regular home page with fake pages, like a "Krug" page in 2003 or a Myspace profile for Solid Snake in 2007.

In 2006, Ramsoomair made a strip depicting creatures from Maxis' videogame Spore, and Maxis created a version of the strip replacing all the drawn characters with in-game versions, and sent him custom figurines of the creatures.

Ramsoomair said that VGCats is "basically ... along the lines of Penny Arcade." The comic originally focused on 2 gamers; Ramsoomair said by 2006 that within the preceding one to two years he began focusing upon parodies of video games instead of the two gamer format.