12 Games of Christmas: Elf Bowling (PC)

Elf Bowling is perhaps the most famous Christmas-themed video game of all time, and that all comes down to it capitalizing on the then nascent internet. Released before the turn of the century, Elf Bowling found fertile ground as the home and work computer began to rise in prominence. Released for free to advertise a website, its simple nature as a desktop amusement caused it to spread with such fervor that rumors arose it was some form of computer virus, but what Elf Bowling truly is is an all too simple bowling game that tries to make you smile with its juvenile humor.

Elf Bowling delivers its set up in a rhyming poem on the start-up screen, the overworked elves of the North Pole banding together to go on strike. The Elf Toy Makers Union refuses to make Christmas toys anymore, so Santa Claus decides the best way to deal with the strike is to go bowling with elves instead of pins. Somehow getting them onto his icy bowling lane, Santa plays a traditional ten frame game of ten pin bowling, the elves for the most part quite nicely staying in their places as you hurl a bowling ball their way. The humor of the game is definitely its main appeal, although you’ll pretty much see every joke there is on offer in a single game of bowling provided you don’t skip past them. The upset elves will taunt Santa if he misses, moon him in protest, dance and sing “Elf Elf Baby”, and get surprisingly maimed by the whole affair. Hitting an elf down with the bowling ball will bruise them and leave them bleeding, the depiction mostly comical even when the machine that resets the pins pulls off the head of an elf by accident. Save for the responses to certain actions like hitting the bunny or frog that hops across the lane, you’ll see the same jokes recycled each time you play, but you can speed through them and very few get annoying despite the high pitched elf voices. The fact the humor runs dry so quickly doesn’t help with its longevity though, especially since the bowling component is incredibly straightforward.

To bowl in Elf Bowling only requires pressing either the space bar or clicking with your mouse, the path of your ball determined by a row of arrows that light up in sequence from left to right and back again over and over. To get a strike actually isn’t about rolling down the center where the arrows are doubled up to indicate the midpoint, but instead you need to click when the light is just about to change from the adjacent arrows to the middle arrow. With incredible regularity this will clear all the elves in the set, making the challenge of the game about just doing this consistently. If you do miss your window you are then required to consider the other arrows in the row, pressing when it’s too far an inevitable gutter ball but there is enough space you can conceivably hit an elf anywhere in the lane. Since the game pretty much comes down to pressing a button at appropriate times, there is very little thought or challenge to Elf Bowling once you understand how to get strikes, but Elf Bowling wasn’t really made to be a good bowling simulation, its design specifically meant to be an accessible idle amusement for people who were just getting used to computers in general. That does not, however, make the bowling any better, and Elf Bowling actually includes some deliberate attempts to prevent enjoying it purely as a bowling game.

Perhaps the most egregious feature of Elf Bowling is that no matter how perfectly you click the mouse 10 to 20 times, it is impossible to get a perfect game. This is because there is an elf who will randomly sidestep a ball coming towards him to deliberately deny you a point. He might not always appear if you aren’t performing too well, but he guarantees that you can’t get a perfect 300, and while his sidestepping of the ball is definitely a joke, it does weaken the experience somewhat when you can’t even try to master this simplistic take on the sport. The elf bowling pins have a few problems besides cheekiness though. There isn’t really a good degree of physics to the way they flop after being beaned by your ball. While it is possible to knock an elf into one adjacent to him, if you ever get a split, there is no degree of fancy aiming that will allow you to pick up the spare. Most elves will just rise up and drop flat after they get hit, and outside of bowling the basically guaranteed strikes, it can be hard to measure what determines how many elves will topple. The elves even seem to ever so lightly shift left and right while standing in place so it is possible they are moving to disrupt your aim. Regardless of the why, the fact you have the bare minimum of control over where your ball goes all but guarantees that you aren’t going to be able to add things like spin to the ball or control how powerful the roll is.

While it was released as a downloadable game, Elf Bowling is pretty much just a flash game in that it is simple in substance and mostly meant to occupy time when there’s nothing else on hand. It’s certainly quaint compared to what can be opened and played in just a modern browser, but it managed to be a sensation because it came out at the right time and was incredibly accessible to even people inexperienced with computers. These facts don’t really make the bowling any more enjoyable, but it was set up to be judged with low standards and wasn’t really trying to be more than a free quick play game for people looking for something seasonal and silly to fill some time.

THE VERDICT: Elf Bowling’s design is about as simple as it can get while still being an interactive bowling game. Its one-click method of playing the sport makes it easy to pick up, but it’s that same simplicity that makes it quickly lose its luster. The elves only really have enough jokes to fill a single ten frame game, and the bare bones bowling  is already designed to not really support anything but clicking at the designated times where a strike is almost guaranteed. It’s not awful to play, but it’s so shallow that it wears outs it welcome before you have really spent too long playing it.

And so, I give Elf Bowling for PC…

A BAD rating. While the jokes, even if more abundant, were pretty much doomed to inevitably repeat themselves and lose their charm, Elf Bowling could have still been at least decent if there was more going on than timed clicks. It’s far too easy to figure out where you need to bowl for a strike and after that it’s just about nailing clean-up shots if you don’t hit the button perfectly. With so few mechanics at play, there’s not much to hook a player or challenge them, and the rare shake-ups like the elf sidestepping a roll only undermine the experience and deny you the small thrill of perfecting a very simple task. Elf Bowling is pretty much designed to make you laugh with the poem, laugh at what the elves do, and then send you on your way to either go to the advertised website or just enjoy Christmas, and there isn’t a problem with that. It doesn’t make Elf Bowling a good game, especially since the humor is pretty plain and puerile, but it’s the kind of game that gets called bad with very little disdain.

Elf Bowling, if anything, is fascinating for its cultural impact. It would go on to receive six sequels, an unauthorized GBA and DS port that is now known as one of the worst games of all time, a film that is similarly known for being horrendously bad, but most importantly, it provided one of the internet’s earliest widespread phenomena. The people who played it were coming to grips with new technology and likely playing it to avoid work or schooling, and in some ways the humor of the game is similar to the e-cards of the time in that you viewed it once and then moved on. Elf Bowling is bad if viewed only for its inherent qualities, but it’s hard not to respect this little free game that became a huge part of early internet culture.