Jess' Cool Forum

Maybe you've walked into a bowling alley when you were young, and saw these trippy old works of crusty 90s CGI play on the scoring computers. That was me once--not in my local alley, but one near some relatives, and I thought it was an exquisite display of art at the time.

Or maybe you just saw their memetic resurgence in the past several years, where the concept of bowling animations just gets associated with surreal/crusty-looking animation in general. Well, there's most likely a reason that's the case, which would be the animations from both the AMF Boss and Brunswick Frameworx systems (latter one was the one I saw as a kid) in particular:

Also fun fact: I wrote the tool used for the Frameworx video a couple years back. I suddenly had a drive to find out more about the animations, but saw that there was no good-quality rip of them, just recordings of TVs/monitors playing them. I did however find this uploader's rip of the original .ani/.sld files, so I ended up trying to crack the format myself, and I did it.

I wonder how they even came up with some of these, like some of them are like sure, and then you have the queen bowling ball

I have played many times with those ugly ass AMF animations on the screens and never seen most of em, even tho im pretty sure we managed to get a 200 game at least once lol