Untitled Goose Game

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About

Untitled Goose Game is a game developed by House House and published by Panic. In the game, the player plays as a goose in a sandbox-like environment and is tasked with completing stealth puzzles with the ultimate goal of annoying human characters. The game released for the Nintendo Switch, Windows, and macOS in September of 2019.

History

On August 11th, 2016, developer Michael McMaster tweeted excerpts from his Slack chat with other developers about making a game about a goose.^[1]

The game went into development shortly after, helmed by Australian indie team House House.^[2] On October 4th, 2017, the team released a pre-Alpha trailer (shown below, left). The game's tagline is "It’s a lovely day in the village, and you are a horrible goose." On August 28th, 2018, Nintendo announced that the game would come to the Switch (shown below, right).

On September 20th, 2019, the game released for the Switch as well as PC and macOS via the Epic Games Store.^[3]

Two-Player Mode

On August 18th, 2020, House House announced^[13] a free two-player mode for the game, with the release scheduled for September 23rd, 2020. House House also announced^[14] a September 29th release of the game for Steam and itch.io.

Reception

The game released to positive reviews, receiving a score of 79/100 on Metacritic^[4] on the day of its release. Critics universally praised the game's humor and artstyle, though critics did mention that the game could get repetitive and could have benefitted from different gameplay elements.^[5]

Online Presence

The game generated buzz on social media. House House, the game's developer, gained over 22,000 Twitter followers.^[6] On the day of release, Twitter users shared their experiences with the game. User @TheCurbAU tweeted "This game is the best" (shown below, left). User @rebecca_joseph used a Distracted Boyfriend meme to joke about how they were more excited about Untitled Goose Game than the Link's Awakening remake that came out the same day (shown below, right).

Peace Was Never an Option

On September 24th, 2019, Twitter user @erkshnrt posted an image of the Goose standing on a handle of an axe, captioned with a memorable X-Men: First Class quote "Peace Was Never an Option" (shown below, left).^[7] The post received over 8,100 retweets and 19,000 likes in two weeks and referenced a popular "Peace Was Never an Option" reaction image of a white chicken standing on an axehandle (shown below, right).

On September 28th, 2019, Twitter user @CampbellxEmma tweeted another image of the Goose holding a butter knife in its beak, based on a close-up of a promotional image for the game,^[8] captioned with the quote.^[9] The tweet received over 20,600 retweets and 71,600 likes in one week (shown below, left). In the following days, multiple users on Twitter used both images as reactions.^[10]^[11] On October 2nd, 2019, Redditor Happinss-Noise posted a meme based on the image to /r/dankmemes subreddit,^[12] where it gained over 43,000 upvotes in five days (shown below, right), prompting popularity of the format on Reddit in the following days.