Holiday memories can be both good and bad. That’s certainly the case with Elf Bowling, perhaps the weirdest Christmas game to ever release. In fact, the only thing weirder than the game may be its strange history, from EXE files that took the internet by storm in the late ’90s, to a Nintendo DS port, to a much-maligned animated film starring the voice of Spongebob Squarepants himself, Tom Kenny.
For the uninitiated, Elf Bowling (and its many PC sequels) is a bowling video game that may be considered one of the most awful sports games of the last twenty years. That didn’t keep Elf Bowling from being a hit in 1999, though, when it became a viral sensation about a decade before the term was coined. In fact, many people thought the game, which came attached in emails as via EXE files, was a computer virus at first.
Eventually, Elf Bowling became such a massive hit on PC that it moved to other platforms and spawned several sequels. Elf Bowling 2 started out as freeware as well, and Elf Bowling 1 and 2 arrived on the Nintendo DS and Game Boy Advance as a single game a few years later. The sequel featured Santa’s brother Dingle Kringle (a failed used ice salesman) and a host of other oddities. From using Ms. Claus’s bra to slingshot elves down the bowling lanes, to pulling an elf up by his thong underwear to send him rolling, Elf Bowling solidified itself as one of the strangest and most offbeat Christmas games of all time.
Elf Bowling: From EXE File To Animated Film
Although Elf Bowling was originally created as a weird marketing demo for the company NVision Design, it quickly turned into a hit PC game that has since spawned over half a dozen sequels. The Nintendo DS and Game Boy Advance copies, which were panned by critics and most players, were only outshined in their awfulness by the 2007 animated film Elf Bowling The Movie: The Great North Pole Strike, which is one of the worst animated movies of all time.
The truth is, Elf Bowling was already a weird game with some not-so-kid-friendly qualities. It just didn’t translate well into an animated film aimed at children. The 2007 movie was also one of the final stops in Elf Bowling‘s strange history as an offbeat Christmas game, since the last video game sequel arrived on PC in 2008. Players can still find online versions of Elf Bowling available to play for free at sites like ArcadeSpot.
Elf Bowling recalls other PC games like Cookie Clicker and Papers, Please that developed cult followings. For all its problems on Nintendo systems and with its movie adaptation, Elf Bowling remains one of the weirdest Christmas video games of all time – and the history behind the game is even weirder.
