Today we’re talking about a goose.
A very specific goose among all the geese and one that might be the most famous goose
on the internet.
I’m referring to the goose that was made by House House, an independent game development
studio based in Australia.
Their newest release Untitled Goose Game starring the world famous goose, has become not only
a highly successful video game, but also a new internet sensation.
But how did a game about a simple goose became such a hit you might ask.
Let’s have a look.
After House House had finished work on their latest game Push Me Pull You back in 2016,
the 4 developers were chatting away about what to do next.
A very important and serious discussion for a small independent studio.
Their livelihood depends on it after all.
Designer Stuart Gillespie-Cook thought the same and ignited the conversation with a stock
photo of a goose.
Many things were said about geese, some complimentary things and some that weren’t, but they all
agreed that geese were an interesting and funny species.
At first, they wrote the idea off as a joke.
Making a game about a goose seemed too silly.
So they turned their attention to other more serious ideas and for several months, they
were making prototypes to see which ideas had potential.
They knew they wanted to make a singleplayer 3D game, but the progress was too slow to
their liking.
It probably didn’t help that they couldn’t shake the goose game idea and kept making
jokes about it.
Jokes that became funnier and funnier.
So, they decided to take it seriously and just go for it.
What’s the worst that could happen?
Putting your livelihood on the line for a game about a goose might have seemed crazy
to many, but maybe it was crazy enough to work.
Since the entire idea was sparked by a simple stock photo of a goose, they didn’t have
much of a plan at the start.
You need gameplay, art assets, music, perhaps a compelling story and so much more to build
a game.
All they had was a goose.
The jokes they made did lay the foundation of the game and they knew the premise had
to be about a naughty goose, one that people would be afraid of and would create conflict.
During the course of the prototyping phase, the developers experimented with funny things
that a goose could do and focused on the relationship between the NPC characters and their goose.
They quickly realized that the low-level relationship between a goose and a person was really interesting
and really rich, and had all this opportunity for depth, nuance and humor.
A very early prototype was a rough version of the garden with a few props in it.
The man overseeing the garden cared about the props and the goose could pick them up.
The team realized they had something special on their hands when they noticed how funny
it was when the goose and the man would keep eye-contact in total silence.
“And just having those two characters look at each other — the world was totally bare,
it was pretty rough and early — but having two characters look at each other in silence
had all this stuff in it.
Just that eye contact creates this relationship that you can put so much meaning into.”
House House took inspiration from both Super Mario 64 and Hitman.
The inspiration for Mario was rooted in his fun expressive moveset told developer Nico
Disseldorp to Gamasutra.
Furthermore, he said that Mario’s controls can do a lot of interesting things and that
it’s fun to press different buttons and make Mario’s body move in different ways.
So they tried to replicate this concept for their main character the goose.
Another developer, Jacob Strasser, mentioned that the idea of having a to do list was loosely
based on the list of power stars from Super Mario 64.
The inspiration from Hitman came from wanting to create small moments of mischief.
Because of this they naturally started to gravitate towards stealth games where the
player might know things that other characters on the screen don’t know.
“We realised it was very rich for the kinds of comedic moments that we were trying to
add to our game.
It has a set-up and a punchline.
By removing the violence from it, we just let the situations exist as a joke.”
During an interview with Nintendolife the team said that the eye-catching art style
was influenced by children’s TV programs from the UK, such as Postman Pat, Fireman
Sam and Brum.
The townsfolk were even modelled after the faceless miniature people from shows like
Thomas the Tank Engine.
The inspiration for the setting unsurprisingly came from the UK as well.
"There's something about the kind of properness of an English village that seems to be the
antithesis of what the goose was all about.
If the goose was going to be chaotic and making a mess, then the natural foil seemed to be
these people who wanted to preserve order."
The idea that began as a joke, actually started to become a funny game in and of itself and
the team grew fonder and fonder of their silly goose game.
Still, when it came down to showing their game to the public, they didn’t feel all
that confident.
To them it may have been a funny idea, but would gamers actually be excited about playing
a game as a goose?
When they were about to reveal the game for the first time at the annual independent games
festival Fantastic Arcade in Austin, Texas, they realized the festival didn’t have a
website, meaning people on the internet wouldn’t be able to discover their game.
They quickly needed to put something online before the start of the festival.
Although this time, a stock photo probably wouldn’t cut it.
They pieced together a trailer and everything was set to post it on their YouTube channel.
But wait.
They didn’t have a title yet and they didn’t want to just slap “Goose Game” on their
video game.
To avoid confusion they posted the video with the title “Untitled Goose Game” and decided
to come up with something else later down the line.
By putting “Untitled” in the title they were sure people would realise this wasn’t
going to be the actual title of the game.
That’s what untitled means of course.
Brilliant, they thought.
Except, the internet didn’t quite agree and accepted the placeholder title with open
arms.
Even more so, the internet deemed the trailer worthy of meme status.
It wasn’t generally looked at as a traditional video game trailer and instead was being shared
around as a meme video.
Within a matter of hours the trailer had been watched half a million times and people were
retweeting it with great vigor.
Later that day it even reached the number one spot on reddit.
House House took notice and after some time they felt comfortable with the placeholder
title.
After all, the internet was showing love because the game was so unique and memorable in every
aspect, including the title.
Changing it now might have even hurt the game in the process.
Later the team confessed they never really came up with anything else, except for one
title “Some Like It Honk”, but they said it was never a viable option.
Like I said before, it wasn’t really a traditional video game trailer.
Most trailers have cool cg footage, riveting gameplay moments, interesting story beats
that leave you wanting more and so on.
Again, their trailer had none of that.
Just a goose running around annoying perfectly normal people that were trying to get on with
their perfectly normal lives.
To the everyday person on the internet, it looked like a funny video they could easily
share with their friends and family.
And so people did.
A lot of people.
Right up until the release on september 20th.
That’s when it really started to take off.
To gamers, Untitled Goose Game looked like something different, something they hadn't
really seen before.
On the surface it may have looked like another simulator game, but once you dig a little
deeper, people noticed there was an actual game there.
A game with objectives, gameplay mechanics and even a fun little storyline.
Combined with the striking art style and catchy music, it helped sell the concept to those
familiar playing games.
And to those unfamiliar, it peaked their interest once they saw some funny gameplay being shared
on their social media platform of choice.
So gamers and non gamers alike started to take notice in a big way.
An ideal situation for any indie developer.
Critics were loving the game as well, complimenting several aspects of the game and many reviews
concluded that Untitled Goose Game wasn’t just a meme, it was actually a very good game
to boot.
The Washington Post even declared it a “safe, socially acceptable way to relieve stress.
It’s the new punching a wall.
It’s the new crying at your desk.”
House House had created the perfect recipe for success.
Not only had they made a game that was very shareable and likeable on the internet, they
had also put in the time and effort to actually make it enjoyable to play.
After the reviews, word of mouth started to spread quickly and not only that, more and
more memes started making the rounds on the internet.
Besides all the memes, some people went a step further and made some amazing fan art
that caught many people’s attention.
Dedicated social media accounts were being created, like this one that mashes up Untitled
Goose Game with popular movies.
It’s still active to this day.
One Twitch streamer even went as far as dressing up as a goose and played the game with a custom
controller he had built himself.
It involved a lot of sensors and looked a bit like this: “Oh my God.
Are you serious?
It works!
It works!”
The game was building quite a passionate fan base for itself.
At this point House House was probably thinking, this is it, this is the height of popularity,
what else could possibly drive even more word of mouth?
Well, the game had caught so much attention already that even celebrities started to discover
it.
Low and behold, some of them even started to endorse it, without being paid for it.
Mark Hoppus, the frontman for Blink-182 gave the game a shoutout during one of his concerts.
"I love that game! Who playes Goose Game?"
Chrissy Teigen started tweeting about it, giving it her shining approval.
This was the kind of marketing force that most developers can’t even afford.
It was clear that none could escape the goose.
But wait a second, September 20th, that’s the same release date as the remake of The
Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening, one of Nintendo’s flagship titles that year.
Surely, Untitled Goose Game would get lost in the shuffle on the Switch online store
because of this.
Well, it turns out that all the memes, fan art and celebrity endorsement was enough to
beat Link and his awakening on it’s own platform.
It took the number 1 spot on the Nintendo store sales chart and this, of course, drove
people to start making memes about that, which in turn drove even more sales.
The goose was unstoppable and was showing up everywhere and by now everyone and their
grandma had heard about it.
The end of 2019 was in sight and the goose game was snatching up award nominations left
and right, but what was arguably better than those nominations, was the attention it got
at The Game Awards.
A whole segment was dedicated to the goose, mashing it with the humor of the muppets.
That year The Game Awards was also especially popular, racking up more than 45 million global
livestreams.
That’s a lot of people and most of them agreed the goose segment was the best part
of the whole show.
A couple of days after the award show, on the 17th of december to be exact, the game
was released for both PS4 and Xbox.
Every platform was now catered to.
Except for a huge chunk of PC players who will get the steam version later in 2020,
but despite that, the game managed to hit a huge milestone before the end of 2019.
In just three months time, the indie developed goose game passed a million sales.
While the game was already a hit on the internet, this milestone proved that it was more than
just another internet sensation and that House House had crafted something that people genuinely
wanted to play and experience.
The developers at House House were taken by surprise that their game had took off the
way it did and told GameIndustry they didn’t expect all the praise from gamers and critics,
let alone the high sales numbers.
“We thought the goose was our joke.
It felt like an in-joke, then we very quickly realized how many people, particularly in
the northern hemisphere, have strong feelings about geese.
I want to say it’s because it’s a largely unnoticed part of people’s lives, so drawing
attention to it is very satisfying in the way a joke can be.”
They also shared their own idea of why they thought the game was getting so much attention
and why it struck a chord with so many players.
“It's very easy to look at a screenshot of this game and immediately gauge what this
conflict is.
I think the goose character allows people to be this source of mischief that lots of
people desire being in video games.
In this game, you're told to go in there and make as big a mess as possible.”
Thanks to the huge number of sales Nico Disseldorp, one of the developers, commented that it was
now possible for the studio to keep on making games for as long as they like.
Whether that means we’ll see a sequel or perhaps DLC remains to be seen, but we can
all take comfort in the fact that this quirkie game studio is going to keep doing what it
does best and deliver charmingly funny game experiences.