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Untitled Goose Game devs talk about the overwhelming response to the game

All honked up
by rawmeatcowboy
16 October 2019
GN Version 5.0

Untitled Goose Game has been riding an insane wave of success. The press loved the game, and the public loves it just the same. Celebrities have been tweeting about it, and memes are popping up everywhere. How do the developers of the game feel about all this attention? VICE talked to Untitled Goose Game designer Michael McMaster to find out.

That’s a really thoughtful question—I wish I could give a straightforward answer. The four of us are mainly overwhelmed, I think. We’re happy, of course, but we’re also very tired, and emotionally fragile, and probably a bit manic. It’s been a very strange feeling to be able to, at any moment, open up our Twitter notifications and see a flood of positive responses to the game, and videos, and people making memes, and BRANDS making memes, and Blink 182 and Chrissy Teigen, and everything else. It’s weird to be able to turn that tap on at any point, and it’s sometimes hard to turn it off. So we’re all a bit overstimulated, maybe.

We knew from when we first posted our trailer that people were excited about the game, but throughout development I think we all operated in this very risk-averse way—trying not to get our hopes up, reminding ourselves that maybe people just like to watch videos of this game, and might not actually enjoy playing it. We were very prepared for the most pessimistic outcome, but I don’t think we ever let ourselves prepare for the most optimistic one. Trying to process all of this (while also speaking to a lot of press, and fielding a huge pile of emails, and patching fixes to the game) has made for a very weird couple of weeks.

[Link]