Don't Shoot the Puppy

Don't Shoot the Puppy was recovered from an undocumented year and has been catalogued under target normalization. Attribution on the original paperwork reads “RRRR.” The specimen was preserved by the Internet Archive and is emulated here in its original form — no installation, no account, no explanation required.

Field notes describe Don't Shoot the Puppy as deceptively simple. Recommended dosage: until satisfied. Demand for this file is classified as heavy; queue accordingly.

Original label: Viewed over 40,000,000 times, this game asked the question "how hard is it to do nothing?". When so many other Flash games needed lightning-quick reflexes and complex problem solving, Don't Shoot the Puppy looked like it needed those things too, but if you did anything you lost. Thousands of comments proved how hard it was for people to think of inaction as a strategy, and still more fell for the later levels (which somehow tricked people when all the ones before were solved without touching anything). From fake popup ads to fake blank screens to fake obstacles, players convinced themselves that this time the puppy needed help, but what we didn't realize was how many people could not just sit and watch for 10 minutes. Even though we sit through movies or TV for hours on end, Flash games ar

Curator’s note: staff replayed this one “for cataloguing purposes” three times.

Filed under: Shooter