There’s nothing like the glow of a monitor to put you in touch with nature.
Outdoorsy games like the “Deer Hunter” series have become a full-fledged craze, attracting millions of players despite their clunky looks and a languid pace.
Many players, like Henry Booth, a Kennewick, Washington, father, have a deep connection to real-world hunting.
“I was raised hunting,” said Booth, 50. “My grandfather took me near the granite bluffs of Burnet, Texas. I saw sunsets for the first time, watched whitetail and jackrabbits go about their lives. The gun was longer than I was tall. It’s been a passion ever since.”
Truncated Washington state shooting seasons - and a job helping the Army dispose of stockpiles of nerve gas — keep Booth from acting on his desires. So he’s turned to the desktop to embrace the outdoors, to “enjoy the hunt without the blood and the mud.”
Often, when Rich Bongiovanni enters the game, he doesn’t even bother to load his rifle. He’s just there to take in the scenery.
The former police officer is disabled by injuries sustained in Vietnam, and made worse by arthritis and time. So Bongiovanni now uses Deer Hunter 3 and a private LAN in his house in the Cleveland suburbs — to take virtual walks in the woods with his wife.
“We used to go out a lot: picnics, playing bocce. We loved the outdoors. Now, I can’t even go to the mall with her. So the game is our way of moving around,” he says.
Its also a way for Bongiovanni, known as Pegleg to fellow gamers, to connect with the outside world. He moderates the message board for Deer Hunter developer Sunstorm Interactive, runs online deer hunting tournaments (more than 85 people have signed up for this weekend’s competition), and serves as an advisor on planetdeerhunter.com. As a result, he’s become something of a guru to virtual hunters.
“I get 150-160 emails a day asking for help,” he said. “It’s given me a social life, an extended family, basically.”
For many in this family of hunting gamers, it’s their first time playing a computer game. Or even spending prolonged time with a keyboard and mouse.
“Lots of [virtual hunters] don’t know how to copy a file, or use Internet Explorer,” Pegleg said. Sold in gun shops, and for a price about half of typical PC games, it’s no surprise that the hunting games have attracted an older, decidedly ungeeky audience.
In fact, that was the plan from the beginning. Because the seed for Deer Hunter didn’t sprout in a Silicon Valley office park, or in a teenager’s basement. It started in Wal-Mart. In the summer of 1997, Robert Westmoreland, a Wal-Mart software buyer, suggested to Paul Rinde, an executive at game publisher Wizard Works (now GT Interactive) that a hunting simulation might be a pretty good idea. Three and a half months later, Deer Hunter hit the shelves. And within 4 days, 12,000 out of the initial 15,000 copies shipped had been sold.
More than 1,500,000 units moved in 1998, making Deer Hunter the second-bestselling game of the year. A torrent of sequels and knock-offs followed, from African Safari Trophy Hunter to Duck Hunter to Pro Bass Fishing. Interest in the genre shows no sign of letting up: Deer Hunter 3: The Legend Continues has consistently been on the bestseller charts since its introduction in October.
These games share more than woodsy themes. They sport graphics rudimentary enough to be handled by the creakiest machine, and a tempo that evokes the hang-out-and-drink-beer rhythm of real-world deer hunts.
For those who like their action quick, or prefer a virtual grenade launcher to the spray-on scent of does in heat, this is nothing short of torture.
“I don’t remember where I got [Deer Hunter] and I don’t know why I haven’t taken the time to delete it,” Spearhead posts on planetquake.com. “Who wants to sit in a tree and play with yourself, I mean, scratch the bark while waiting for a fake deer to walk across the screen so you can miss and have them run away?”
The flames from hardcore gamers, as well as attacks from the anti-hunting crowd, have put Deer Hunter players on the defensive, said Pegleg. Many virtual hunters even bristle at the idea that they’re playing a game at all. This is a simulation, thank you very much, not of a testosterone-fueled killing binge, but of a quiet encounter between man and nature.
