A video game goose with a fitting riposte to our troubled times: HONK!
A goose who honks at villagers offers catharsis for those feeling helpless in the modern world, writes Laura Waddell
It’s a lovely morning in the village, and you are a horrible goose. HONK! So begins Untitled Goose Game, currently the best-selling game on the Nintendo Switch and Epic Store for PC, and the founding of a new wave of memes. Nothing else is quite setting digital culture aflap at the moment like this one small white bird.
Back in 2016, Michael Mcmaster tweeted a screen grab of a conversation. “People think game development means you get to play games all day, but they’re wrong – it means you talk about geese.” The chat showed the first stirrings of Untitled Goose Game.
“Let’s make a game about this,” started Stuart Gillespie-cook, a developer at studio House House, attaching a stock image of a generic goose. “Best thing about a goose is the bit above their nose.” Fellow developers got on board in the replies. “Honking noise,” contributed Nico Disseldorp. “The whole animal is just two colours. It’s crazy.” “Also the beak frowns always.” “Yeah they’re always cross. Ducks are happy, geese are cross.” “You’ve really summed it up.” It was the combination of an eccentric idea with a kind of ‘dare accepted’ gutsiness to see it through.
The idea is exceptionally simple. A goose terrorises a sweet village and its villagers going about their business in the way that real geese do – by flapping their wings, pecking, and most of all, honking at people. Players press y to honk, sometimes with the intention of startling a gardener, schoolboy, or shopkeeper with a view to stealing items from them, but mostly players press y to honk just for the sheer enjoyment of honking, while going about one’s business as a horrible goose.
After short clips were shared online, a groundswell of interest in the game bubbled up until it became reality, and Untitled Goose Game kept the working title fans had grown fond of through word of mouth. It’s a little reminiscent of bizarrely wonderful Katamari Damacy, the game where players roll up items to a huge, pointless ball of stuff, but it also shares some of the early internet’s taste for irreverent animals. ‘Badger, badger.’
The simple concept and colour palette combine to perfect escapism in this age of hyperreality and daily horrors, but the game allows users the cathartic expression of dissolute, negative feelings through its petty, annoying actions. It has, naturally, given rise to a slew of memes and parodies. A tweet that will resonate with many online commentators by @nailheadparty reads “It is a beautiful day on the internet, and you are a horrible p **** .” There are inevitable photoshops of the goose chasing down Trump to honk at him. Different shades of horrible emerge, from mildly inconsiderate to homicidal. It is chaos, wrapped in a small, annoying, feathery package, with an expression impossible to read any more deeply.
In the last few years, a niche subculture celebrating anti-social animals has emerged online, captured best by the Twitter account @ binanimals which rejoices in sharing images of scavenging creatures such as raccoons, pigeons, and the ibis (known in Australia and New Zealand as a ‘bin chicken’). Captions are often explicitly political, always rooting for the working classes, and with an anarchist or Robin Hood flavour. As squirrels run away with stolen goods, the wider context is how animals respond and adapt to the detritus of our messy, urban lifestyles and capitalism’s excessive detritus and garbage, and how they