GOODBYE VOLCANO HIGH
It’s time to play triceratops trumps
“WE THINK AUDIO AND MUSIC IS WHAT MAKES AN EMOTIONAL LASTING CONNECTION”
You’d be forgiven for thinking that, of the many things a game about dinosaurs that go to high school is likely to be, ‘relatable’ isn’t one of them. Yet you would be wrong. Despite the dinos, this is set to be a game that tells a deep, surprisingly human story.
Goodbye Volcano High is a narrative adventure game. The player drops in when graduation is on the horizon and the protagonist, Fang, needs to make a decision about where they want their life to go. “What this game is really about,” says Saleem Dabbous, studio director and GoodbyeVolcanoHigh co-director,
“is asking yourselves, if you knew everything was going to come to an end, what would you do with that time? What are the choices that you would make? And who would you want to be?”
KO_OP isn’t quite ready to go into great detail about how the game will play, but it’s keen to stress that player choice will be important. Things go much deeper than ‘path A or path B’, as co-director and animation director Kyle McKernan explains: “There’s [a] choice of pursuing newer things versus your really close friendships or relationships, or your family, or your music, it all interweaves and adds up as the story goes on.”
Ah yes, the music. The audio will be an important part of GoodbyeVolcanoHigh (“we think audio and music is what makes an emotional lasting connection,” says Dabbous). Fang is in a band, VVORM
DRAMA, with their best friend Trish—and their music will be featured in the game. The idea of potentially prioritizing the band over personal relationships is certainly a very interesting one.
It’s the nature of KO_OP as an artist-owned and -run studio, though, which gives GoodbyeVolcanoHigh its true heart. There have been no barriers to infusing the game with the identities of the people who made it. “[KO_OP is] made up of a lot of queer people, and a lot of trans people,” says Dabbous. “We’re able to have those elements be a part of the world and the story and the characters … we don’t have to fight for that, and we don’t have to necessarily center that either. They’re just a part of our world as a given.”
THIS IS THE END
Development began in 2018, and the idea was always to give the story something of an apocalyptic vibe. The end of an era in terms of graduation from high school; the fact that the characters are dinosaurs, which as we know went extinct; the pressures of making important life choices… stress, endings, and the unknown were always in the mix.
And then, 2020 happened.
“Since [2018] things [have become] more and more dire, in terms of just like our political climate, our ecological crisis,” explains Dabbous. “There’s a lot of things out there that feel like these looming huge issues that are almost cataclysmic, right? And we’re just like, OK, what is our responsibility as creators to tell narratives that capture this feeling in time? … I think that we’re trying to ask ourselves, like, what does it mean to exist at the end of an era? What does it look like? And what is your personal responsibility?”
The coronavirus pandemic has proven to be an instructive lesson in how humans react to cataclysmic events (for good or bad), but it also means, as Dabbous puts it, “We have to make sure that it’s not read as a straight COVID [commentary].” McKernan adds, “I think that a really interesting balance to try to strike, is that we’re trying to treat the subject as responsibly as we can and with as much weight as it warrants, while still having our own kind of world.”