The History of Elf Bowling

Elf Bowling was a game originally created as a holiday promotional game for a Dallas based web development shop, NVision Design. The game was created by the company’s owners, Mike Bielinski and Dan Ferguson. The original copies of the game feature the NVision Design logo and has several Easter eggs revealing secrets about the game and humorous tidbits from the creators. Recently the original game has been re-released with several things removed.

Mike Bielinski wrote the game code and Dan Ferguson created the art. The whole game was written over a 2 week period. The game was originally intended to be used as a holiday Christmas card for NVision Design and took on a life of its own, once it hit the Internet. NVision Design was a small internet development company based in Dallas, Texas in the late nineties.

The game was released in November of 1999 by attaching it to an email and sending it out to several hundred friends and family members of Mike and Dan.

A week or two after the game was released Mike and Dan began receiving emails from fans asking about an Elf Bowling Virus. Both Dan and Mike immediately contacted several virus software companies to verify that their game was not infected and that the virus scare was actually a hoax. These companies helped spread the news about the scare being a hoax.

The emails about the Elf Bowling Virus spread faster than the actual game. These warning emails generated more excitement about the game, which caused more and more people to ask about the game, which generated more downloads. Then newspapers, TV stations and radio talk shows began covering the virus and virus hoax. This compounded the buzz and eventually help create the hit that the game became. At its peak, the game was being played 300-400 times a second. The game was installed on 7.6 million desktops in one month making Dan and Mike the first independent game developers in history to have a game reach Comscore/Media Metrix Top 10 Game Install List whose game did not come prebundled with the Microsoft Operating System.

The game was originally written in C++.

2 months after the release of the game, Mike and Dan sold their company. In 2001, they helped start a new company called Blockdot.com. They still build games and have created over 100 to this date. Their new work can be found at www.kewlbox.com