We got a bit carried away with the idea of, 'What if you're a horrible goose?'' We all talked about how funny we found geese, and it stuck with us for awhile. 'At some point, Stuart posted a picture of a goose in our Slack and said, 'Let's make a game about this.' This was in mid-2016 I think. We liked the idea of a third-person, Mario 64-esque game. 'We were really interested in moving into 3D and doing something with single-player. 'As we were wrapping up production on Push Me Pull You, we had a bunch of different ideas flying around,' McMaster says.

This was a surprise to the studio, as the idea for the game was at the time not much more than a casual joke that fellow team member Stuart Gillespie-Cook put on Slack one day. We didn't expect it to sustain us.'īut House House did gain a small amount of notoriety just enough that when the team posted the first trailer for Untitled Goose Game in 2017, it drew a significant amount of interest. It was not a massively commercially successful game. We got some money, but it pretty much all stayed in the company. It was completely done with day job funding. But for all of Push Me Pull You, we never received a paycheck. 'A fair bit of that game's marketing was supported through state government funding, so that helped us travel to a few conferences. 'We were fitting it in around study we were doing, or day jobs,' he says. House House's first game was made entirely part-time in 'bedrooms and lounge rooms and stuff,' according to McMaster. Push Me Pull You was not a runaway success. 'For all of Push Me Pull You, we never received a paycheck' 'We're three years more professional than we were three years ago,' Strasser adds. 'I don't know how professional we are now,' he says, 'but it felt like a slow process of professionalization.' Push Me Pull You, he says, was just a summer project they made for themselves and other friends that slowly morphed into a PlayStation release. Strasser and McMaster are one half of Australian studio House House, which McMaster describes as a group of four guys who hung out together and played games with one another and had never made a video game before. This is despite having shipped a game of moderate notoriety (Push Me Pull You) and being just one day away from a second release that's getting considerably more flap: Untitled Goose Game.

Jacob Strasser and Michael McMaster still don't entirely believe they're real, professional game developers.

Untitled goose game goose