Bambo, a deer toting an attitude and an M-16, is stalking his prey. He knows there's a hunter in this neck of the woods -- how else to explain the "stack o' nudies" left behind?
Now, hoping to draw the drunken outdoorsman from the trees, Bambo coos in a female voice, "Help, I'm naked and I have a pizza."
Anti-hunter? Not us, say the folks at Simon & Schuster, whose best-selling PC game Deer Avenger is drawing sniping from hunting quarters.
"We have nothing against hunters. We have hunters who work in our office, right here in Manhattan, hard as that is for some of our critics to believe," says Walter Walker, vice president and marketing director for Simon & Schuster Interactive.
"We're talking about a parody of a game, not political commentary on hunters."
That's their story and they're sticking with it: Deer Avenger is a take-off on Deer Hunter and Cabela's Big Game Hunter, the hunting games that have been perched high on the best-seller lists for months.
But the game that Walker calls "whimsical" strikes some hunters as vicious. They say Deer Avenger targets them as "beer drinking, womanizing idiots," in the words of Chris Draper.
Draper, using his Hunting Trail Web site as a platform, has called for a boycott of Simon & Schuster and its corporate parent, Viacom.
While there's no telling how many of the nation's 14 million hunters are unhappy with Deer Avenger -- or have even heard of the game -- Draper and other riled outdoorsmen are using the Web to round up as many as possible.
"They may not feel the crunch as of yet, but I'm sure that when the full impact is seen, they will feel our boycott," Draper says. "With organizations like the Hunting Trail, Safari Club International, the International Hunting and Fishing Museum, Bowhunting.net and more on the campaign trail, we will make our voices heard."
Draper cohort David Parker, who runs an archery site on the Web, says they're protesting "to uphold our reputation -- that we do care for the environment, we do care for children and family morals." The hunters in Deer Avenger cover the male parodic spectrum. There's the hillbilly, Jed. Blasted to smithereens, he croaks, "Lynyrd Skynyrd will avenge my death."
There's the yuppie, Tadd, who scans the forest and allows, "This is nice. What's it called? Nature?" And there's Tree Hugger, whose prancing ways have drawn some to conclude the gamemakers were mocking gays.
This motley crew is united in one respect. Sooner or later they all answer to Bambo's calls: "Free Beer! Who wants a cold one!"; "Viagra, get your Viagra!"; and "Sweet, Baywatch is on!"
Clicking on the Fart button might also flush out these hunted hunters.
This less-than-flattering picture of hunters has proved wildly popular with game buyers. Released in November, Deer Avenger is now Simon & Schuster's top seller and is No. 9 among all PC games. To the corporate chiefs in Manhattan, these hard numbers -- and a commitment to comedic freedom -- more than balance out the 250 or so email complaints that reach their offices each day.
In the email age, a protest of that magnitude just doesn't have much impact. "It's so easy to zip off an email in organized campaigns like this," Walker says.
And there's the, uh, eloquence factor.
"We've had a lot of trouble making sense of much of the email," Walker says. "The people sending these emails ... it doesn't appear as though writing was a career option."
