Of Wolf and Crap

In 1994 while working at Best Buy, I used my employee discount to buy a game titled simply “Wolf”. Tonight, while rummaging through the garage, I found the game’s manual. While flipping through the manual I couldn’t help but remember how awful this game was.

Wolf isn’t an action game — it’s a simulation. It was released in 1994 during the wave of “sim” games. After SimCity gained popularity, gamers saw SimTower, SimAnt, SimEarth, SimFarm, and so on (here’s an entire list). And while Wolf was from a different developer (Sanctuary Woods), it might as well have been called SimWolf.

In Wolf, you play a wolf. One of the games “exciting features” is that the wolves in the game are based on real wolves. I wonder how many people were actually excited that you could play as Hambone, Nimrod, or one of the other real wolves? I didn’t make those names up. Those are really some of the names of the wolves in the game, and you can’t change them.

Once the game begins, you get to kill people and have to avoid being shot by hunters with silver bullets. Wait, that’s Werewolves. No, in Wolf, you’re just a wolf, and you do what wolves do. You spend the entire game hunting, eating, drinking, and eventually mating. Go, Nimrod, go!

You can play Wolf in two different modes. The first of which has no real goal, other than to survive. You can imagine how exciting that is after a few minutes. In the other mode, the game assigns you tasks like “Go eat a rabbit” or “Mate with Sheeba whether she wants to or not”. Occasionally hunters will show up and try to shoot you. Run, Nimrod, run!

The goal of Wolf is to eat, live, mate, and raise cubs. Unfortunately there’s no way to win. Eventually you will get shot, starve, or die of old age. Nobody said being a wolf was fun. Then again, nobody said playing this game was, either.

A few years later, Sanctuary Woods released another game called “Lion”. That game is completely different except it’s exactly the same except in that game you’re a lion who eats wolves.

A few years ago while cleaning out the garage I found my original disks for Wolf. I sold all 8 disks for a dollar, which means I got about 12 1/2 cents per disk. I felt pretty lucky to get that much. Perhaps subconsciously I didn’t include the manual so whoever bought it wouldn’t be temped to play it. In case you want to try it out, here are a few of the game’s commands:

S – See
L – sLeep
E – Eat
G – diG up
I – sIt
J – Jump
B – Bark
F2 – Cursor
H – Hear
C – sCent Mark
Space – Commands
N – smell w/Nose
F1 – Help
P – droP meat
U – bUry
M – Map
W – hoWl
T – eaT and carry
D – Drink
A – Autoplay

Hell it might be simpler to just wander out in the woods, get bitten by a real wolf, go home, swab the DNA off the wound, and somehow create your own wolf from that. I don’t know how to create life from wolf slobber, but it’s got to be less complicated than this game.

Bad, Nimrod, bad.