The beautifully simple secret to the success of Untitled Goose



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Untitled goose game is a blow. Since coming home a week ago, House House's stealth comedy has seen some important accomplishments, including positive reviews, as well as media coverage. He also generated a series of memes and was the subject of a tweet from Chrissy Teigen.

This is one of those rare treats; a really fun video game. Its main protagonist is a petty goose whose anarchic activities scandalize a small, once peaceful town. The goose spends her time doing deep silliness, which usually means that she is setting up a series of procrastination.

A good gardener uses a hammer to kick a nail into a sign. The goose slips behind the gardener. At the crucial moment, the horn honks loudly. The man knocks his finger and falls through a door. We laugh.


Playing the game reminds me of Charlie Chaplin's first comedy films, Laurel and Hardy, which I adore. Today, we tend to view the slapstick as a kind of unsophisticated and immature comedy. But the first stars of the movie were working with jokes already known to their audiences, through the vaudeville. Their genius was to refine and reframe the gags so that they feel both new and perfect.

When the goose pulls a chair under a character who is about to sit down, we are seeing a joke that we have seen many times before. Most of the time, it's not a funny joke, partly because of its familiarity and partly because the "comedian" (let's say your annoying uncle) has no comedy skills.


But the goose makes it funny again. My question to two of the developers, Stuart Gillespie-Cook and Nico Disseldorp, is … why?

"These are jokes that are repeated over and over again," says Disseldorp. "We really knew we were following this kind of joke. But this has never been as accurate as: "Oh, let's look at a slapstick slapstick movie and analyze how it works." We were trying to create a common memory of these jokes, from many movies, from the silent period to today's children's movies. "

I ask him how the team makes his jokes.

"We do not start with" how can we make this funny, "he says." We assume that the player already knows how the joke works and we are looking for ways to joke something that the player actually has Is. What kind of interaction is required? What are the best accessories? What are the best animations?

Gillespie-Cook adds that "a lot of that makes the player believe that he invented the joke. We show them the humor and make them believe that they are preparing the joke, which makes it profitable. "

"We give you the ingredients," says Disseldorp. "You see the parts of the joke and you imagine it playing in your head. And then you pull the chair and you see them falling on the bottom. You have won this joke. You made it happen. It's yours. "


Games have the benefit of trial and error, so failure states can also be fun. Players can honk the gardener too soon or too late, which leads to different results.

"We try to make sure that the joke has some means to make no mistake," says Disseldorp. "We do not want it to be so easy, so as soon as you see what the joke is going to be, it's already over. If you have to try three times to make the joke work, it's funnier when it works. "

"Missed opportunities are often as fun as the real punch line," says Gillespie-Cook. "In addition, we leave a lot of minimal variations to the player. We watched hours and hours of people testing their games, and the slight changes make the jokes again funny. A player honks and flaps his wings, or another stands in front of the victim and looks at him. "

Like the early filmmakers, House House takes familiar humor and rebuilds it to fit a relatively new medium. Video games are rarely always fun, because of their narrative and technical limitations and their reliance on repetition. Game of goose without title, Chuchel and Wattam continue the exploration of interactive comic timing. It is perhaps not a coincidence that all these games rely on childish worlds to convey universal humor.

Non-player characters in Untitled goose game are familiar archetypes. The gardener is a man who loves his environment and arranges everything to his satisfaction. A proprietor shopkeeper violently protects her property. A loose boy is afraid of the distraction of the goose.

"Our favorite type of comedy is related to these very archetypal and platonic ideas of characters and all situations," says Gillespie-Cook. "They are instantly familiar to people."


Originally, the team had written over a hundred NPC potential archetypes, reducing them to those who worked best with each other and with the goose, which is the star of the show.

"People seem to have this very special relationship with geese," says Disseldorp. "They are a little afraid of them. Geese can be very aggressive. It is a very powerful animal that arouses a lot of feelings in people. But they are not seen as wicked or mean like a snake or a scorpion. "

"We really tried not to give the bird a too emotional look," says Gillespie-Cook. "It's empty enough that you can read what you want to read. You can project yourself on it.

The way the goose looks at people, although they get mad with exasperation, is one of the most endearing qualities of the game. The goose spends a lot of time stealing objects and placing them in impractical places. The mechanisms are like stealth, forcing the goose to know that it is not observed, or to want to be watched for its own sneaky purposes.

"We wanted the goose to look at the objects with which it interacted so it would not be flickering or highlighted," says Disseldorp. "So it was obvious that the goose also had to look at people, and that people also had to look at the goose. By the time this eye contact was detected, we realized that we had found that perfect interaction where it was real. It is this moment of understanding between man and animal that fills their lack of common language. "

In the end, the goose is an agent of chaos and evil in a world of rules and order. He is an unruly child. That's why the game appeals to adults as well as kids.

"The impetus we have taken is that players just love to do the mess or whatever they are in," says Disseldorp.

Untitled goose game is published by Panic and is now available on Nintendo Switch, Windows PC and Mac. If you play the game, take a look at our helpful Untitled goose game guides.

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