A summary is presented of recent simulations of the wetting behavior of simple gases on alkali metals. A specific focus is the nature of the wetting transitions on these surfaces of the gases helium, hydrogen, and neon. Since transitions have been observed experimentally for all of these systems, a principal motivation for performing the simulations is to assess the adsorption potentials which are used in the calculations. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.