Apple Shooter History: Wolf Games, Andrew Wolf and Ruffle

Who made it

The game names its own makers. Its credits screen, reached from the ABOUT WOLF button on the main menu, reads: artwork, programming and animation by Andrew Wolf, music and sound effects by N8-Music. It links to www.wolfcom.ca and www.n8-music.com. The intro opens with a Wolf Games logo and the word "Presents" before the title, and there is a SKIP INTRO button.

Today wolfcom.ca redirects to OfficeGameSpot, the Wolf Games portal. Its Apple Shooter page still lists the developer as Wolf Games and describes the game in a few lines: shoot the apple off your friend's head with a bow and arrow, every level moves you further away, and holding the mouse button longer gives the shot more power (official page).

When it appeared

The Internet Archive first saved that OfficeGameSpot page on 19 March 2008, and it saved the game file itself, arrow_shooter_03.swf, a few days later. Apple Shooter was therefore online by spring 2008. The file is in the Flash 8 format and runs at 36 frames per second.

What is inside the file

The menu has four entries: START GAME, HI-SCORES, ABOUT WOLF and SEND THIS GAME TO A FRIEND. The title screen states the whole goal in one line: shoot the apple from 100 feet, over 17 levels, to save your friend. If you get there, the game says CONGRATULATIONS, tells you that you have saved your friend, and promises a star beside your name on the score table.

Much of the file is sound. It carries close to fifty effects: applause, a crowd gasp, several groans, blood sounds, the bow being restrung, and a set of fart sounds that can play at random while you hold a shot. That last one is not a joke from us. The code really does roll for it on every frame while you draw.

The parts that depended on a server

Two features were never inside the file. The hi-score board and the "send this game to a friend" form both sent requests to scripts on officegamespot.com. The scripts the game calls to read scores, save a score and send the email now all return "not found". On a copy like this one, the hi-score screen cannot load scores and the email form cannot send. The original scores are still public on OfficeGameSpot's own high-score page. At the top of that list are players who reached level 17.

How it runs after Flash

Adobe ended support for Flash Player at the end of 2020, and browsers removed the plugin. This site runs the SWF with Ruffle instead. Ruffle is an open-source Flash Player emulator written in Rust and compiled to WebAssembly, and it reads the original file directly. The page loads a copy of Ruffle stored on this domain, so the game you play is the original Wolf Games file, with its own code, art and sounds. It is not a remake.

Ruffle shows a warning panel on computers without hardware graphics acceleration, which is common on school Chromebooks. That panel can swallow the first click, so our player page hides it. Everything you see after the intro comes from the original game.