House House’s Untitled Goose Game (2019) is one of the most commercially successful indie videogames ever produced in Australia. Made by a small team of friends in Melbourne, the game has achieved something beyond critical and commercial success in the years since its release – the goose has become digital shorthand for a particular flavour of mischievousness. Magneto’s once-ominous pronouncement from X-Men: First Class (2011), “Peace was never an option,” is now synonymous with our avian antihero, as memes superimposing the line over images of the goose mid-crime circulate online. With the introduction of a goose emoji in an Apple iOS update in 2023, wayward intent can be articulated in a single symbol.
From its conception as a joke in a group chat to the myriad of ways players have modded, memed, recreated and broken the game in search of new ways to cause the same kind of mischief, Untitled Goose Game’s sense of humour inspires creative thinking. Its mischievous role in the zeitgeist can’t be accounted for by sales numbers alone. Maybe thinking of Untitled Goose Game as a joke-making toolkit, rather than comedy videogame, is our way into understanding its cultural impact.
Comedy videogames
The gags in Untitled Goose Game work, and they work reliably – a deceptively difficult feat. Game designers don’t have the same control over pacing and timing as film directors or playwrights do. Their narrative’s protagonist is the player; armed with a controller and free will, we can simply not do as the designers intend.
In this interactive format, comedy is probably easier to do by accident. The most clowned-on moment in videogame history is a funeral service in Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare (Activision, 2014), which clumsily attempted to simulate grieving by asking players to ‘Press F to Pay Respects’. Thus, an internet phenomenon was born with derisive memes expressing how completely this moment shatters the illusion of player agency. By attempting to dictate the player’s emotional state to them, ‘Press F to Pay Respects’ revealed Advanced Warfare as a system, not an actual world. You’re not really making choices, you’re pushing buttons. Fs in the chat.
Purposefully funny videogames can fall into similar pitfalls of over-engineering. Justin Roiland’s bawdy, rapid-fire dialogue worked for millions in 20-minute episodes of Rick and Morty (Adult Swim, 2013–present), but his videogame High on Life (Squanch Games, 2022) was variously described as “excruciating” (The Guardian), “extremely derivative” (The Gamer Website), and “surprisingly wholesome” (IGN, quoted wildly out of context). The nihilistic, gross-out, gag-a-minute dialogue becomes utterly unbearable when delivered into your headset over hours of gameplay. As Alyssa Mercante so eloquently put it in Kotaku: “When the game shuts the fuck up, there are some genuinely funny moments.” People don’t like to be told to feel sad; they don’t like being told to have fun, either.
By contrast, Untitled Goose Game is mercifully restrained. The single piece of writing in the game – the to-do list – lays out its prompts without fanfare. Instead of using narrative or a ludicrous premise to deliver comedy to you (or at you), the to-do list offers players opportunities to be the comedian – setting up the punchline, and then letting you make the joke.
Action-stealth videogame franchise Hitman (IO Interactive, 2000–present) offers a way to think about Untitled Goose Game’s brand of comedy. IO Interactive even recognised the kindred spirit of the goose by including a ‘no geese’ in a level in Hitman 3 (2021), bringing the game’s design references full circle. In Hitman, you play as Agent 47, an assassin who carries out missions in complex, busy environments. It might sound more like a psycho-thriller than a comedy, but as you maneuver this absolute unit of a man around a yacht party, fashion show or underwater lair, his hulking out-of-placeness is immediately funny. The absurdity is redoubled by the NPCs’ total lack of interest in his increasingly suspicious behaviour. As you pilot Agent 47 through another bungled attempt to poison a punch bowl, the other characters’ commitment to retaining their usual routines is, frankly, awe-inspiring. Hitman also doesn’t tell you exactly how to kill anyone, but the mob boss eats pasta on his balcony every evening… and there’s rat poison in the kitchen….
Like a Hitman level, the pastoral environments of Untitled Goose Game operate at a rhythm whose cadence the player memorises to plan their attack. Like in Hitman, the goose has clear objectives, but the player decides how to achieve their goal. Like Hitman, the comedy comes from the doing, not the telling. It isn’t making jokes at you; the game gives you the material to make your own jokes.
Player as Comedian
The components of Untitled Goose Game are simple. There is a village full of locals going about their routines in patterns. There is a to-do list that offers potential punchlines: ‘Get the groundskeeper wet’ or ‘Drop a bucket on the burly man’s head.’ And there is you, the goose, to whom the rules do not apply. You enter a world where there is order, and you bring chaos. This combination of familiar gags, a cast of hapless rule-followers and a lawless antihero has a lineage in centuries of physical comedy, from the sixteenth-century Commedia Dell’Arte theatre performance to silent films. Whether you’re mid-shenanigan or surveilling a villager from a distance, you know what’s going to happen next – and that’s part of the fun.
Despite its long history, slapstick has historically been derided for its supposed failure to innovate. Far from being its weakness, the genre’s recognisable tropes and archetypes are its strength; audiences are so familiar with the language of slapstick that a precariously placed bucket may as well be Chekov’s gun. In slapstick, the joy comes from anticipation – you understand immediately what is about to happen. In the case of the goose, you know instinctively what you can do. Beyond offering a punchline prompt, the game doesn’t need to dictate the player’s actions further; it lets the familiar visual language of slapstick guide you.
Slapstick’s appeal also taps into the unfortunate reality that most of us live more like the villagers than like the goose. We have our routines, we dutifully follow rules even when they seem pointless, we understand and respect that actions have consequences. By contrast, slapstick’s antiheroes have no qualms about disrupting the humdrum of daily life to achieve their own ends – and when they do, they tend to succeed. The fantasy of defying social convention is cathartic; briefly, we escape our duties and indulge in speculation about which rules might be more breakable than we imagined. Like slapstick’s antihero, the goose isn’t bound by the social conventions that stop us from ruining other people’s afternoons for fun.
In this sense, Untitled Goose Game is literally cinematic – a word all-too-often reserved for videogames with lifelike graphics and too many cutscenes. But Untitled Goose Game does more than just reference slapstick tropes – it wholly embraces the spirit of its source material. As an interactive medium, you are the star of the comedy, not the viewer. If slapstick lets us fantasise about breaking the system, Untitled Goose Game lets us live the anarchic fantasy out in avian form.
Player Creativity
Mischief, like all forms of anti-authoritarianism, requires you to question the system. In every detail of its design, Untitled Goose Game encourages this kind of creative thinking. It gives you the tools to break the rules, cause disruptions, and achieve your own ends in any way you please. Its players have answered this call to action with gusto; they even do it by breaking the game itself.
Twitch Streamer Rudeism, known for streaming videogames using bespoke game controllers, literalised the game’s invitation to embody the slapstick antihero. He livestreamed the entire game using a home-made wearable goose suit that doubled as a controller, peppering a sheet, beak and orange flippers with sensors to control the goose’s movement, honk, and wings.
Bespoke challenge runs, an inherently disruptive form of play, proliferate in Untitled Goose Game player communities – from speedruns to ‘no-honk’ challenges. The fastest time for completing Untitled Goose Game is just two minutes and four seconds – a feat that speedrunner Hipaws achieved by exploiting glitches uncovered by players looking for new ways to create chaos. YouTuber Desinc used the same glitches to break out of the game entirely, wandering the vast green emptiness where unused collision boxes go to die.
Not content with finding new ways to cause problems in the game’s village, players have translated the goose’s brand of mischief into other mediums. A fan-made Minecraft (Mojang Studios, 2011) remake of Untitled Goose Game’s first level demonstrates the recognisability of the game’s comedic principles. Even in Minecraft’s drastically different visual style – and though the goose has been replaced with a chicken – Delta2Force’s Untitled Chicken Mod is instantly recognisable. The prompts on the to-do list have been adapted to accommodate the objects available in Minecraft, but they retain the original game’s punchline-first wording. Like the incurious citizens of Hitman, Untitled Chicken Mod’s groundskeeper, rendered in low poly, returns to his gardening once the goose is at a slight distance.
Beyond recreating levels beat for beat, players have piloted the goose (and all that it symbolises) into unexpected new genres. A fan-mod of Capcom’s Resident Evil 2 (2019) replaces the terrifying antagonist Mr X with a giant goose who lurches through the dank hallways, as implacable as its predecessor. The visual is hilarious partly because it presents a perfect reversal of the power dynamic in Untitled Goose Game – the player is no longer the disruptive agent of chaos, but its gormless, routine-loving victim. Like slapstick, horror trades in anticipation and release; with this new perspective, the sense that there is one predictable outcome, regardless of how it will be achieved, takes on a very different tone.
Rather than dictating how we play, Untitled Goose Game offers us material to play with. By positioning the player as the comedian, it bypasses the common pitfalls of comedy in games to create an environment where players feel motivated and enthused to participate in the game’s sense of humour. The feeling of freedom this engenders is infectious; through creative play, mods, and memes, people continue to use the goose to make each other laugh all over the world.
Real creative play is one of the fundamental ways that people learn to understand themselves in the world. Like comedy, it creates an imaginative space where we can test the boundaries of our thinking. Even just for a few minutes or hours, Untitled Goose Game lets us inhabit a reality where we are empowered to ignore social convention and rearrange the world as we like. By giving total agency to the player, Untitled Goose Game offers the same quietly radical proposition that slapstick films offered before it: that a system, however naturalised, can always be disrupted. A goosier world is possible.
– Jini Maxwell, Curator, ACMI
This essay was published in Untitled Goose Game – Softcover
Explore the story behind Untitled Goose Game – from its origins as a joke between friends to becoming an international sensation. This magazine-style book offers exclusive insights from the creators, behind-the-scenes sketches and deep dives into the game’s impact on digital culture. A must-read for fans and gamers alike.