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.