While Untitled Goose Game itself has only a dubious association with the concept of a retro game (it came out in 2019), the Boss Fight book by James O’Connor posits the indie title as part of an unusual gaming tradition- by which I mean Australia. Yes, Australia does have its own game market and game history. Apparently, The Hobbit, as in the 1982 text adventure, was developed by Beam Software down under. Although from there it’s a twenty year long jump to the next best known Australia video game, Ty the Tasmanian Tiger and then it’s with the success of Fruit Ninja that Australia really comes into its own mainly as a developer of mobile games.
This curious preamble to the story of Untitled Goose Game proper gives this book an odd depiction of Untitled Goose Game and Australian gaming at large. Namely, the implication is that Australian game development has been, for the bulk of its history, almost entirely centered around developing the intellectual property of better-known countries and has typically been successful mainly to the extent that Australian games tend to be difficult to distinguish from games made anywhere else. It somehow never even occurred to me before reading this book that Ty the Tasmanian Tiger was an Australian game despite…well…despite it being right there in the title.
This isn’t exactly a flattering depiction, even if James O’Connor does his best to make the history engaging. And it’s a bit fascinating to read that history, finally coming up into the development of Untitled Goose Game proper, and to realize somewhat incredibly that yes, the big hit title does indeed represent a merging of all these unflattering influences. Geese are memetic creatures, even if no one country can claim to own them. Untitled Goose Game is also not about Australian geese, but a domestic goose that harasses people in an English village. Despite taking place in England, and having clear affection for the idyllic English village, Untitled Goose Game is not reverent toward its source material. James O’Connor notes the subtle jabs the game makes at the concept.
And lastly, Untitled Goose Game is short. While certainly playable on a mobile device, though, Untitled Goose Game transcended that reach and is widely available on consoles as well. Programmed in Unity, O’Connor discusses many of the programming pratfalls of Untitled Goose Game, although for the most part the story isn’t an especially dramatic one. The book is the largely wholesome story of a bunch of friends who just wanted to get together to make a fun game, who succeeded at that, and were so clueless about their accomplishment they failed to read hints that maybe they should attend a certain award ceremony.
Was Untitled Goose Game that great of an accomplishment? Aside from all the awards it earned, that’s actually a bit of a hard argument to make. James O’Connor only gave Untitled Goose Game an 8/10 in his very own review for Gamespot. This isn’t as big a knock against the game’s aesthetic or historical relevance as you might think. In an era where games became increasingly defined by outrageously overambitious AAA titles or outrageously cheap mobile ones, Untitled Goose Game hits that strange middle ground of a fully featured game world where all you can really do is annoy people by acting like a goose. That’s all it really needs to do, that’s all it’s structured to do, and that’s all a player really wants to do in the engine anyway.
All of this leads to a vibe that, even just six years later, makes Untitled Goose Game feel more like a third-generation video game than a seventh generation one. What generation are we in now anyway…the eighth? Or ninth? Whatever generation we or Untitled Goose Game may be in, though, there’s no denying the charm of its simple concept, and I’m loathe to look down on the Boss Fight book of its story for that reason either even if it, too, probably only ranks about an 8/10.
