So, my partner and I were recently doing some Hypnospace Outlaw-type stuff looking for an edited petz breed from back in the day -- this one, the 'Mercy Dog'.
Let me get right to the point: this was my dog!!!
In 1998, when I was 10 or 11, I emailed one of my favorite breed creators, who had a Tripod page called "Skyblue Kennelz," asking if she'd make my real dog, Mercy, into a breed, which she kindly did!
The real Mercy was a "lab/dalmatian cross" as far as my child self knew, but this seems less likely in retrospect. She looked a lot like a labrador, but nothing like a dalmatian (not even the spots, which were more like the ticking seen on a cattle dog or English setter). She was a Very Good Dog no matter what she actually was, but that's why the Dogz II breed based on her was described as a lab/dalmatian on the original Skyblue Kennelz site.
However, the download itself was called MERCYDOG.EXE (a bit ominous in retrospect!)...
...and for some reason this was the name that stuck as the breed made its way to other sites, eventually including the famous Minibyte's Petz Archive, who not only archived the breed but ported it forward to Petz 3, 4 and 5. (The gamemakers switched numerals after II for some reason.)
In Petz 3 onward, you could breed two petz together to create mixed breeds that inherited traits from both parents, in a way that was actually pretty varied and realistic for what it was.
Although the Mercy Dog was created to *resemble* a mixed breed, it originated with Petz II which lacked this feature. Once it was ported to the later games, it was a 'purebred' as far as those games were concerned, and could now be crossed with other breeds to create actual mixes.
From there, it apparently gained a few fans, possibly helped by the mild mysteriousness of Minibyte's description providing some intrigue.
Like Dali Central, a "dalmatian rescue" offering adoptable dalmatian mixes. (That is, unlike the many sites offering new breeds for download, which allowed you to create new individuals of that breed in the game's Adoption Center, this site offered the individual pet files -- specific critters that had already been created and named.)
I love the specificity of this, modeled after breed-specific rescues in real life, which usually have more mixes than purebreds. The Petz fandom was, and apparently still is, absolutely full of creativity like this.
So anyway, the person running Dali Central used the Mercy Dog as a basis for many of their mixes. They basically took this 'mixed breed' that wasn't, and bred it out to create actual mixes with a lot of neat variations!
The white chest "ball" with black spots is an identifying feature in most of the Mercy descendents. Breed editing skills have come a long way since 1998, when it was mostly done by kids blindly fiddling with raw hexadecimal code until they figured out which numbers changed what. It was beyond most of our skills to do more than change the color, pattern or size of an entire ball at once. (Features like the snout blaze and chest patch seen on "Creamcicle" above are inherited from one of the official breeds.)
So rather than having a spotted white splash on the front of the chest like the real Mercy, the Mercy Dog wears a 'vest' of dalmatian patterning around the whole chest and back. Very striking and not a flaw in my opinion! Mercy Dogs resemble a real dog who existed, and they exist in turn because of an 11-year-old who loved her (and a kind creator who responded to that kid's request!), but they're their own thing, too. That's perfectly fitting, since this breed was out there being loved by others who knew nothing about this context.
Here's one detail that gets me: Mercy Dogs were originally an edit of the official labrador breed introduced in Petz II, and it seems like the proprietor of Dali Central mixed them with, among other things, the official dalmatian breed introduced sometime later.
So if the real Mercy was never actually a lab/dalmatian cross, and neither was the Mercy Dog (being basically a labrador with aesthetic tweaks), then apparently she has some digital descendents who actually are! And I think that's just so cool?? This was just happening out there somewhere, and I never knew.
And you KNOW I downloaded all eight of them from this page, which is amazingly still up even though it hasn't been updated since 2008! And I think I'll go ahead and download everything else from this site too, since it's a very cool thing that deserves to be archived.
There's also this person who posted to a forum almost six years ago asking about the breed. Long enough ago that I wonder if they'll ever see the response I'm planning to post, but still MUCH more recent than any of this. It really gives a peculiar feeling to know that someone was still thinking about this breed almost 20 years after it was created.
In the end it was my partner who found the breed for me by asking a Discord community for help, which they offered immediately! I'm very grateful to them for making sure this breed still exists after 25(!!) years, along with many many others.
Maybe it had a certain mystique for some people, not knowing why the heck this thing was called 'Mercy Dog' when most fan-created breeds were either real life breeds or at least intentionally weird -- neon sparkledogs and even different species altogether, like dragons and pigs. This was just a labrador with a white chest and feet -- why was it called *Mercy Dog*? I almost wonder if I should tell them the truth or just say I've found the breed and leave it at that.