Nature documentaries always have me rooting for the prey animals. It’s the circle of life and all that, but gazelles seem pretty chill, and when a pack of hyenas swoops in and starts lunging at the slow one it’s hard not to cheer on the underdog. My recent experiences in WolfQuest have widened my perspective, though.
“We have people who found the game when they were 10 years old, and they’re still playing it, you know? It’s crazy,” says Producer Dave Schaller.
My gray wolf, Dogmeat, takes no nonsense from mule deer and elk whatsoever—and yes, he goes right for the slow ones every time. Who can blame him? He’s a father of seven, and his first winter as a parent has been a rough one. With all the region’s prized elk migrating away from his territory, any trip for food is potentially lethal, and a fat enough cow puts food on the table for a week. It’s underdogs all the way down; and if I can’t win a peace prize, I can at least win father of the year.
I owe my ecological enlightenment to the power of edutainment, courtesy of a game developer called eduweb and the Minnesota Zoo circa 2007. WolfQuest simulates a gray wolf’s day-to-day in Yellowstone National Park; players hunt prey, mate, raise pups, parley for territory with other packs, and survive as long as they can in an environment rich with predators, prey, and rival wolves.
Ecological Enlightenment Through Edutainment
My initial interest in the game came from its unique premise—and the fact that it was created in collaboration with famed game publisher the Minnesota Zoo. But I ended up captivated by the engaging survival RPG/sim beneath the surface. I’m not alone in that, either, as WolfQuest is 17 years into active development across various versions, with a niche but dedicated playerbase sticking with it for nearly two decades. How many dozens, hundreds, thousands of edutainment games have come and gone in that amount of time? The death of Flash must’ve wiped out a whole generation all by itself.
Dave Schaller, founder of eduweb and WolfQuest producer, attributes WolfQuest’s success and continually enthusiastic community to it being in an otherwise unfilled niche.
“There aren’t three new wolf simulation games coming out every month,” Schaller said. “There’s just not much competition. There’s some. But no one really wants to make it how we want to make this: as realistic to a real wolf’s life as we can, while still being a game.”
In the game’s early days, that trailblazing instinct was a double-edged sword. A detailed, multiplayer wildlife simulation is as ambitious now as it was two decades ago, and WolfQuest’s origins as a zoo extracurricular meant that quickly became obvious to its small development team.
“It’s not an established genre. How do quadrupeds hunt other quadrupeds, [like] ungulates? Well, you can’t play five games and see how they handle it,” he said. It was his studio’s first big 3D game and funded by a grant, which ran out around 2012. The original release of WolfQuest, Schaller said, “was never the game any of us were really hoping it could be.”
Since its inception WolfQuest has been rebuilt and re-released twice. Both times it was with the intention of realizing the vision that was never possible with the original project’s schedule and budget.
