At a glance, House House’s 2019 honking sensation Untitled Goose Game may not seem like the most obvious choice to write a book about. The game — essentially a stealth game where your job is to cause trouble — was a viral hit, but isn’t filled with extensive lore or complex mechanics that beg to be broken down over the course of hundreds of pages. So when Boss Fight Books announced a Goose Game book, I was curious to see what approach it would take.
As it turned out, not only there was a fascinating behind-the-scenes story, but the game ended up being a perfect entry point to talk about developer House House and the broader Australian game development community — which has struggled to make a name for itself over the years.
As part of an effort to spotlight game-related books and documentaries, viraltrendingcontent is running an email interview series with the people behind them. Check out the full list to read up on a Sky: Children of the Light book, a Street Fighter 2 documentary, and others. Below, Untitled Goose Game book author James O’Connor discusses the Australian game development scene, the power of coincidence, and page 171.
viraltrendingcontent: On the surface, Untitled Goose Game is a relatively simple game. What inspired you to write a book about it?
James O’Connor: The initial spark was, more than anything, a want to write about the Australian game development scene. I’d long been a fan of Boss Fight Books, and the more books they released, the more it felt to me like an opportunity was being missed if they didn’t publish any books about Australian game development — a topic I knew fairly well from my time working as a games journalist down here.
For decades, the country’s studios were best-known for their work with ports, handheld translations and licensed titles — Australian studios were cheap and had a reputation for getting good work done fast. Following the global financial crisis in the ’00s, a lot of the foreign investment that was fueling that work dried up, and studios began to shutter. What we ended up with was a wealth of experienced game developers who knew how to work efficiently, who had never been able to work on their own original ideas… and then along came the iPhone and the App Store. I get into this in more detail in the book!
Image: Boss Fight Books
I pitched a book on Untitled Goose Game for fairly practical reasons — I wanted to write about the shifts and changes across the local industry from 2010 to 2019, and Untitled Goose Game capped off that decade perfectly with a huge, strange, funny hit, one that had struck a huge cultural nerve. It’s just kind of a perfect object — a singular idea, realised brilliantly, a game that everyone immediately recognized the moment it was announced. I figured that digging down into how a game like this came to be would be interesting and fun. Luckily, I was right!
What did you learn about Australia’s development community when working on the book?
I’ve been in and around Australia’s game development community for a long time — as a journalist, and then eventually as a developer myself — but the thing that surprised me most was how many folks from across the local community intersect with the story of Untitled Goose Game’s development. Working on this book felt a bit like how I imagine Stephen King feels when he writes a story and finds the characters from his other books suddenly walking across the page, except that most of it is set in Melbourne rather than Maine. Oh, here’s the guy I interviewed for a magazine ten years ago; Ah, I didn’t know the person who used to run this festival was friends with the team; Huh, this story has weird parallels to this other story I heard. That sort of thing.
I have long benefited from the generosity and support that flows through the local game development community across Australia, so it’s been nice being able to share some of that with readers.
What was the wildest anecdote or behind the scenes story you came across when reporting the book?
I will say that this isn’t necessarily a huge “wild anecdote” book, in that the stories that are really wild in here are more about how well everything went than how poorly. There isn’t a scene where a goose gets loose in the office and causes havoc, or where the publisher comes over for dinner and the four lads at House House have to try and disguise their ruined roast. The wild anecdotes are more along the lines of the perfect person to help them with the next part of the development process just sort of showed up one day.
Perhaps the anecdote that has stuck with me the most since writing this book is the one I lead with — the story of the day the four members of House House really cemented themselves as a team. Like many good stories, it starts with a misunderstanding, continues with a coincidence, and ends with them playing Sportsfriends. It’s this weird Sliding Doors moment — I honestly believe Untitled Goose Game would not have happened if things had gone even slightly differently on the day I describe in the introduction. There are a few such instances throughout the story, and it’s interesting to think about.
What’s the best page in the book?
Page 171. Partly because it’s right near the end, so once someone gets there, they’ve enjoyed the book enough to make it all the way through (hopefully). But that page also does something a little fun that I won’t spoil.
I know I’ve just singled out the start of the book and the end of the book, but I recommend that people read all the other pages in between, too. Honk!!
