Cthugha was started by Australian coder Kevin "Zaph" Burfitt but not released to the public until version 2.0 in March 1994. The program gained popularity with release 5.1p in October 1994. Cthugha was released for
Linux ("Cthugha-L") in May 1995, and for the
Macintosh ("MaCthugha") in January 1996 Cthugha was used as the
video wall background for the
Australian children's TV game show
Challenger, hosted by
Zoe Sheridan during the late 90s. Burfitt stopped work on Cthugha in January 2001, and there were various attempts by others to carry on the project, but by that time there were so many clones of the software that there was little enthusiasm. Cthugha may have been the forerunner – either in inspiration, or possibly even as
source-code – of the numerous and varied "
visualisation" plugins for
mp3 players and media players on many computer architectures. In 1998, it was ported to the
Winamp music player. ==Usage==