Game: What's the most important part of comedy?
Player: I dun-
Game: TIMING!
Player: hehehe ok
Game: What's the most imp-
Player: timing
Game: You! Soulless bastard!
Player: woah, ok buddy
Game: Well if you're so clever, knock knock
Player: Who's there?
Game: THE 4th WALL!
Player: heh yeah ok cool
Game: NO!! YOU SAY "THE 4th WALL WHO?"!!!1!
Player: ... the4thwallwho
Game: FROM THE TOP, ASSHOLE. KNOCK KNOCK!!
Player: ffs man
menu > quit > delete

Noita calls itself “The Falling Sand Roguelite”, a description which will probably only make sense to people who spent a lot of time playing flash games. For those of you who didn’t, “Falling Sand” refers to a genre of simulation sandboxes where you spread around particles of various substances, like water, oil, or sand, and play with their interaction. You watch as oil separates itself from water, which you can then set alight, and then smother with sand. There isn’t a goal to accomplish, the reason to play is simply for the joy of experimentation. Noita builds its worlds around this concept, with every pixel of the environment having simulated physical properties, which you can manipulate using the random magical abilities you find along your journey. Your goal is to traverse a series of biomes, fighting increasingly stronger enemies until you reach a tough-as-nails final boss. Even in this small summary though, you may have noticed the disagreement between each of its genre halves. If progression is done by defeating a linear set of enemies, why is it mixed with a genre about freeform experimentation? Not only does the linear difficulty structure incentivize players to only create wands that kill enemies as quickly as possible, the randomness of the magic means the map generation always has to include a freely accessible exit that doesn’t require magic at all. Most of the time, you’re just quick-firing boring magic missiles or arrows, leaving all the fun interactivity essentially as window dressing. Not only that, but taking risks with more complex wands is actively disincentivized by how fragile your character is, when accidentally hitting yourself is often a one-shot kill, leaving you with no way of enjoying that wand you were so lucky to craft. Confusingly enough, this falling sand game not only lacks a sandbox for experimentation, but it actively discourages you from experimenting much at all. It’s no wonder that some of the top mods on the Steam workshop are the ones that add testing rooms and custom wand spawning, giving players a way of actually enjoying the potential of the robust simulation. This is one of the rare times I’m happy about a game being heavily modded, because the beauty of all the elemental interactions is something more people should experience, and I’m glad there’s a way to do so without sinking hours into mediocre roguelike randomness.

Following the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal of 1998, Dallas-based NVision Design emailed their first Macromedia Flash project, Good Willie Hunting to 200 people on April Fools Day of that year. The small 1.4MB file garnered 5,000,000 downloads and 300,000 site visits by October, quickly cementing NVision Design as self-proclaimed proprietors of "aggressive design for the internet and traditional mediums."¹ As an early advergame, Good Willie Hunting was plastered with the creators' creed, website, and contact information, and the company quickly found themselves contracted the likes of AT&T, Miller Brewing Company, Texas Instruments, and Lucent Technologies.² Subsequent releases Good Willie Speaks, Y2K - The Game, and Frogapult kept the clients rolling in and the site views climbing. The December 1999 release of Elf Bowling would be where NVision Design truly exploded in popularity however.

It's critical to know that at this time in the Internet's relative infancy, .exe files (among other filetypes) could not be removed from email strings, hence the popularity of these small programs when they were sent en masse. Their proliferation made them a ripe target for fictitious claims of them being viruses. Around December 8, 1999, email strings and usenet posts on the alt.comp.virus newsgroup stated that Frogapult, Y2K - The Game, and Elf Bowling contained "a delayed virus attached to them that will be activated on Christmas day and will wipe out your system. Let everyone know of this."³ A similar hoax email proffered:
"If you have received Elf Bowling or Frogapult games that have been circulating the Internet, or know anyone who has, they must be deleted before Christmas day. They contain viruses that are set to go off on Christmas day and will delete your hard drive. If you don't believe me, just wait and see. Our IT guy here just tested it on a non-networked PC and everything was wiped out. Make certain that every copy is off of your hard drive or any servers. Please spread the world. These games are very detrimental to your computing life."⁴

This was quickly disproved by Symantec's AntiVirus Research Center, but that didn't stop the name of NVision Design's titles from spreading even further. If anything, the notion of such innocuous games - particularly Elf Bowling - harbouring malicious intent made them a great curiousity, particularly when they were demonstrated to be safe.⁵ It isn't as if the claims were entirely spurious, however, as email-distributed viruses had wreaked havoc previously in cases like 'Melissa,' and NVision's games in particular accessed their servers without express permission from the user (only to upload high scores and perform very basic analytics, but the point remained).⁶ Regardless of its safety, the risk in opening a random program sent to you without your consent that would unknowingly make an outside connection was immense.⁷ As such, when the virus claims turned out to be a hoax, the media looped back around on NVision Design by labelling games like Elf Bowling as potential spyware, a claim which was adamantly fought against by the company as per their official correspondence.⁸ Even today, Elf Bowling is labelled as spyware on TechTarget's site in a definition article updated in July 2021.⁹

Ultimately, Elf Bowling was and is simply a juvenile time waster which exploded in popularity to the point where the mainstream media audaciously claimed by 2001 that it was bigger than Quake or Doom.¹⁰ The gameplay couldn't be simpler and everything about it is so cheesy that it's almost charming. It received an astonishing number of sequels, the majority of which weren't bowling at all. Elf Bowling 2: Elves in Paradise is a shuffleboard game. Elf Bowling 3 is a target shooting game. Super Elf Bowling returned to the series' roots only for Elf Bowling: Bocce Style to once again veer off course. Elf Bowling 6: Air Biscuits bears similarities to Elf Bowling in that elves are to be knocked down, but this time these pin-replacements have another elf thrown at them rather than a bowling ball.

With Elf Bowling 7 1/7: The Last Insult, 'true' bowling gameplay returns, this time with powerups and powerdowns and a method of control that has you spinning your ball as it rolls down the lane, a la HyperEntertainment's HyperBowl Plus! or Skunk Studios' Gutterball 2. And you know what, it ain't half-bad! The items are largely irrelevant since you can either avoid them or counter them with your own powerups, but it plays fine. And when you get a strike the game slows down to comical levels as it shows the elves launching like you're playing BeamNG.drive and want to relish those softbody physics. I'll have to save the remainder of my paltry 43 remaining minutes in the trial version for when I want to play some more of this, which will probably be never.

Recommended by Nightblade as part of [this list]

1. "NStorm Takes Internet By Storm," NStorm, archived October 18, 2000, http://www.nstorm.com/whatis/willie.html. Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20001018131151/http://www.nstorm.com/whatis/willie.html.
2. Abby Miller, “NVision Makes a Game of Better Marketing,” DMNews, November 7, 2007, https://www.dmnews.com/nvision-makes-a-game-of-better-marketing/.
3. Motoaki Yamamura, "FROGAPULT, ELFBOWL, Y2KGAME Virus Hoax," Symantec AntiVirus Research Center, Symantec, publication date December 8, 1999, archived February 29, 2000, http://symantec.com/avcenter/venc/data/y2kgame.hoax.html; Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20000229230522/http://symantec.com/avcenter/venc/data/y2kgame.hoax.html; “Frogapault Warning (Hoax?),” Google Groups (Google, December 9, 1999), https://groups.google.com/g/alt.comp.virus/c/CLa9zFjBMEA/m/Lu1RDeqcOGMJ. “Elfbowling Virus,” Google Groups (Google, December 9, 1999), https://groups.google.com/g/alt.comp.virus/c/Rwwlfwu5hPM/m/paYcVzz04GsJ; “Possible Trojan in Elf-Bowling Game,” Google Groups (Google, December 7, 1999), https://groups.google.com/g/alt.comp.virus/c/Qmcqg8Co6ME/m/goVFGgq3Y7kJ; Evan Hansen, “Vectrix.com Acquires Creator of Frogapult,” CNET (CNET, January 3, 2002), https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/vectrix-com-acquires-creator-of-frogapult/.
4. “Elf Bowling Virus.html,” Scambusters, November 25, 2020, https://scambusters.org/elf-bowling.html, quoted in H. Thomas Milhorn, Cybercrime: How to Avoid Becoming a Victim, (Boca Raton, FL: Universal Publishers, 2007), 284.
5. Fw: FROGAPULT, ELFBOWL, Y2KGAME virus hoax, accessed September 11, 2022, http://www.enron-mail.com/email/bass-e/all_documents/Fw_FROGAPULT_ELFBOWL_Y2KGAME_Virus_Hoax_1.html.
6. Dan Briody, CNN (Cable News Network, March 29, 1999), http://www.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9903/29/melissa.idg/.
7. Ernie Smith, “Elf Bowling Game History: It's Not a Virus. It's Not Spyware.,” Tedium, December 21, 2017, https://tedium.co/2017/12/21/elf-bowling-history/; Heidi Prescott, “Truths: No Santa's Elf Virus, No Free Stuff,” South Bend Tribune, December 13, 1999, sec. Personal Technology, p. 16.
8. Ernie Smith, “Elf Bowling Game History: It's Not a Virus. It's Not Spyware.,” Tedium, December 21, 2017, https://tedium.co/2017/12/21/elf-bowling-history/; “Elf Bowling,” Elf bowling (NVision Design, November 1999), https://www.geocities.ws/Colosseum/Court/7685/elfbowl.html#privacyconcern; David Wilson, “E-Mailed Game Secretly Connects Private PCs to Firm: Bowling Santa Knocks down User's Privacy,” The Ottawa Citizen, December 27, 1999, sec. High Tech Report, p. B5.
9. Ernie Smith, “Elf Bowling Game History: It's Not a Virus. It's Not Spyware.,” Tedium, December 21, 2017, https://tedium.co/2017/12/21/elf-bowling-history/; Alexander S. Gillis, Kate Brush, and Taina Teravainen, “What Is Spyware?,” SearchSecurity (TechTarget, July 13, 2021), https://www.techtarget.com/searchsecurity/definition/spyware.
10. itzaferg, “Elf Bowling Fox News Interviews Elf Bowling Creators,” YouTube (YouTube, August 3, 2014), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pD3nBXwPjRg; LGR, "Elf Bowling: "Bigger Than Quake or Doom!,"" YouTube (YouTube, December 5, 2016), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28TyIsCwkQo.