.SOW File Extension

A SOW file is an .ARJ archive that contains game data used by Descent or Descent 2. For example, a SOW file contains .HOG, .PIG, .HAM, and .256 files. SOW files are stored on the games' game discs.

In the Descent series of games, players pilot a spaceship on a series of missions to destroy mines infected by an alien computer virus. Interplay Productions and Parallax Software released the first Descent in 1995 for MS-DOS and Mac; they released Descent 2 in 1996.

Both games' installation discs store game assets in SOW archives. When you install the games, the game's installer unpacks the archives' data to the correct locations. However, you can also use an ARJ decompression utility to manually unpack a SOW archive.

You can extract the game data a SOW file contains using any ARJ decompression utility. For example, you can use ARJ Software ARJ32 (Windows), WinRAR (Windows), or 7-Zip (Windows) to extract the files a SOW file contains.