Aahhh...
Last new box moved into my new house.
This is gonna be great!
I'm all alone,
I can do anything I want.
Nobody bothering me...
No problems at all.
It's December but that doesn't mean anything. I'm all alone...
[mischievous giggling]
Oh, yeah...
Nice and comfy.
And alone, the most important part.
I swear, if there's a Christmas clone behind me...
- Hi! - Haahh... alright.
You know what, I moved.
- How are you here? - Huh! Christmas!
- I guess it really doesn't matter. - Christmas! Christmas...
I see you have a new Santa hat, though. That's...
I was gonna say nice, but I prefer the older one to be honest.
[goofy laughing] Ha ha, oh! Christmas...
You know what, it's pointless.
It's December.
That means it's time for Christmas Lazy Game Reviews.
It's Christmas!
[electronic "Little Drummer Boy"]
[fizz, sip]
Aahhh!
[typing]
Elf... Bowling.
If there's a Christmas game that results in equal parts nostalgia
and groans of disdain, it's this one.
Created by NVision Design's game development arm NStorm,
Elf Bowling started as a late-'90s Flash game.
Although what I have here is the Super Elf Bowling Collection
sold by Mumbo Jumbo in 2005.
As testified by the very existence of this box,
Elf Bowling was absurdly popular
to the point of earning this physical collection,
receiving at least seven sequels and spinoffs over the years
and even it's own feature-length movie, somehow.
This may come as a shock,
especially if you're only familiar with Elf Bowling 1 & 2
for the Game Boy Advance and the DS,
one of the lowest-scoring game releases of all time.
Well, I think the moment has arrived
to take a look at how on Earth this happened
because it's actually darned fascinating.
The story of Elf Bowling begins
with a handful of marketing and design folks
headed up by creative director Dan Ferguson and Mike Bielinski.
It was in 1997 that they founded NVision Design in Dallas, Texas,
a self-described...
Which sounds a bit pretentious to me.
Here, their team created anything from websites to sales brochures
to video games on a case-by-case basis
with clients big and small,
including Mattel, Texas A&M and Frito-Lay.
And in order to drum up awareness for their studio,
they created a number of free games as publicity stunts,
which they referred to as "advergames."
Games like Good Willie Hunting,
a violent parody of the then- current Clinton-Lewinski scandal,
and Frogapult,
a violent frog-catapulting skill challenge.
But it was Elf Bowling released in November of 1999
that really grabbed the public's attention.
And part of the reason why was due to a chain email hoax
which claimed Elf Bowling was a virus in disguise
that would wreak havoc on Christmas Day.
Well no infected versions of the game were ever found,
which prompted security firms and media outlets
to spread the news of the false alarm,
and awareness of Elf Bowling only increased from here.
And so, due to a combination of crafty emails,
straightforward gameplay and its unapologetically crass nature,
Elf Bowling soon became one of the most played games on the PC,
with 7.6 million players by December of 2000.
At one point, as far as mainstream media was concerned,
the Big Three in PC gaming
were Doom, Quake,
and Elf Bowling.
REPORTER: It has become of the most popular computer games in the country,
even bigger than Quake or Doom.
It's called Elf Bowling.
LGR: But now that we know where it came from, the question remains:
why did so many people play so much Elf Bowling?
There were plenty of games created by NStorm as a viral marketing tool
for their advertising overlords.
So why did this one end up jumpstarting a bizarre media empire?
Well, let's hop right into the original game,
which like most of the others came packaged as a self-contained executable.
You're plopped right into the main menu with little fanfare
and greeted with an incredibly slow text crawl,
setting the stage in the form of a low- effort "Night Before Christmas" rewrite.
The summary is that Santa's elves are overworked,
under-appreciated and going on strike.
And instead of negotiating, Santa decides to show 'em who's boss
by using them as bowling pins in a rare, but not unexpected,
show of saintly sadism.
But if that's all there was to it,
I don't imagine Elf Bowling would have caught on to the same degree,
because that's not much of a setup.
But once you start a game, it becomes immediately more apparent
why this went viral in the earlier days of the Internet.
ELF: Hey, Santa.
[elves laughing]
[ball rolling and pins crashing]
LGR: Yes, pure asinine behavior.
Not only do the elves frequently taunt Santa,
but pressing the spacebar or a mouse button
will smash a bowling ball into them
[elves screaming, pins crashing]
SANTA: Ho ho ho ho!
LGR: that results in screams, flailing bodies and a bit of blood.
There's no worrying about velocity, angles or spinning of the ball.
It's just a one-button affair that exists for one purpose.
Knocking around some elf skulls
to celebrate the age-old tradition of wasting time.
And beyond its base but rather harmless violence,
you also have a few random events to deal with.
Sometimes animals will cross the lane, getting in the way,
other times the head elf will step aside and screw up your shot.
So even once you figure out that you can get a guaranteed strike
every single frame with the right timing.
you still might not get a perfect score
due to your elves being jerks.
And then you have moments like this,
where the pinsetter malfunctions and rips off an elf's head!
Which just makes you want to keep playing in case you miss something else like that.
This simplicity, combined with a bit of mayhem,
make the experience quite cathartic.
And beyond that, there's just enough unpredictability
to avoid it being entirely braindead.
ELVES: [singing] Elf, elf, baby.
LGR: Well, okay, it's still pretty braindead,
especially nowadays when even a free app on your phone
is a thousand times more complex–
with a thousand times more ads, but that's another story.
But still, maybe you can see the appeal if you put yourself in the shoes
of someone in 1999.
It was free, dead simple to experience,
a little bit naughty,
and afterwards it compelled you to share it with your friends.
That's Viral Marketing 101, right there.
ELF: Is that all the balls you've got, Santa?
LGR: It was also during a time when absolutely anything interactive on a computer
was still exciting to a whole bunch of people,
since this arrived right in the middle of the dot-com boom
when more folks than ever were buying computers
strictly to get online.
And Flash games in general were still a relatively new concept,
and I have no doubt that Elf Bowling inspired many people to make their own.
Throw in a little bit on infamy regarding false virus claims,
and Elf Bowling was the right game at the right time to hit a home run.
As for why exactly it ended up with so many freakin' sequels and spinoffs
that people actually spent money on,
most of which had nothing to do with bowling at all,
I'm still not sure I have an explanation for that,
other than people are a bit stupid.
Especially so with the infamous version ported to Nintendo portables,
which wasn't even authorized by the original developers
and is a testament to the magic of garbage shovelware.
But whether you love it or hate it,
the original Elf Bowling made sense,
for the salacious point in time that produced it.
And while the game itself isn't very good,
I find it oddly satisfying to own and display it
in my collection.
[jazzy Christmas music]
Did you like this video? Well I hope so.
And if that is the case, then click on some of these if you'd like to see more.
Or just check out new videos every Monday and Friday here on LGR.
And as always, thank you very much for watching.