You describe the relationship between a person and a goose as one of depth and nuance. It was a way to keep it low-stakes in that personal, intimate way that we quite liked. We were more comfortable with the idea that, yeah, maybe they’d shoo you away as maybe you would a goose in real life, but unless you’re a hunter or an animal-control person, you’re not going to do anything more than that. Strasser: We never wanted there to be any threat of violence or open hostility between the players and the game. We wanted to keep it as realistic as possible. To turn that into a violent fail state would just feel so egregious in this setting. McMaster: The relationship feels quite real, and quite tangible. The lack of a fail state is because of that relationship, and because of how grounded it was. The big crowd scene was too macro to allow those sorts of things to happen, so we realized it was more interesting to have fewer people and allow those relationships to exist more richly. We very quickly realized that the low-level relationship between a goose and person was really interesting and really rich, and had all this opportunity for depth and nuance and humor. Strasser: As we were building out the game, actually, the first ingredients we needed were the goose and the person. Did you ever play with the idea of there being a fail state in the game? I’d imagine that was mostly a practical issue? With a huge group of people you’d need so many possible interactions between all the people and all the objects in the world. What happened then was this slow process of winnowing down the concept so that rather than this massive crowd of people, it became this collection of a handful of people. But we didn’t really think through how complicated it’d be to design and program this completely systemic fête. We had this image of a huge crowd of people, and you as a goose would come in and disrupt that. Michael McMaster: The original pitch for this goose version of the game was that there’d be this large-scale simulated English fête - a country fair is kind of the American equivalent. The goose seems like it’s mainly a disruption of the community, this asshole goose who keeps showing up to disorder everyone’s lives. It’s interesting you were thinking about depictions of community. ![]() Stuart made this joke about the goose and we had a laugh about it, and then we said, “Okay, let’s go back to more serious ideas.” But when that didn’t quite work, we finally said, “Oh, what about that goose thing?” Eventually we turned around and realized that it could be a serious idea, a viable game. We were very interested in depictions of community and having this character that you could puppeteer so you could embody this physical thing. Strasser: When we were finishing our last game, Push Me Pull You, We had a lot of different ideas floating around for our next game. What was the motivation for turning the funny goose into a game? There’s a big distance between “this image is funny” to wanting to make a full game out of it. We all agreed that geese were very funny. There was never really any intention that we should make a game about it, he just saw a stock photo and remembered that geese were funny, like, conceptually. Jacob Strasser: Yeah, that was our colleague, Stuart Gillespie-Cook. The game started when someone just put a picture of a goose into your Slack and said, “Let’s make this a game,” right? I asked them about the uncanny appeal of the goose, how the game developed from its earliest concepts, and the idea of the goose as a leftist icon. Propelling the goose through the pleasant, bucolic environments feels like engaging in some ultimately harmless misbehavior, a playground of sanctioned naughtiness where you’re definitely going to ruin someone’s day, but you’re never going to destroy anyone’s life.Īfter playing through all of Untitled Goose Game in almost one sitting (and forcing myself to stop before starting in on the post-game extra credit), I talked with Jacob Strasser and Michael McMaster, two of the four-person indie game company, House House, which created and developed Untitled Goose Game. Untitled Goose Game is improbably fun, at least in part because of how low-stakes it all is. The worst thing that happens is someone’s thumb gets a little hurt. You break a few things, but nothing all that important. ![]() You make some of the villagers do awkward, annoying things to deal with your mischievous shenanigans. ![]() You irritate a gardener by stealing some of his belongings. Untitled Goose Game is simple: You, a goose, wander around a small English village and enact mild, hilarious chaos. Suddenly and somewhat unexpectedly, the internet has become obsessed with a game about a goose.
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