“Obviously we had hoped that people would enjoy the goose game, but we were absolutely shocked by the scale of its initial reception.” “Trying to figure out what exactly leads to something becoming viral like that seems totally futile, and a bit nightmarish-trying to engineer it even moreso,” said Untitled Goose Game designer Stuart Gillespie-Cook. 2019’s Untitled Goose Game, about players controlling an obnoxious goose whose goal in life is to be an annoyance, similarly broke containment and became an online sensation beyond the usual interested parties. This phenomenon is not new to video games, though. I should probably get in on that action.” “I feel like every time a game uses an animal as its main character or key art, it ends up doing gangbusters. “I feel like the simplest answer is probably the right one: People bloody love animals,” said Mike Rose, founder of video game publisher No More Robots ( Descenders, Yes Your Grace). “They asked me to get it and then played it for more than a day without losing interest,” said Scherschel, who noted his kids found out about the game from YouTube creator DanTDM. (I can relate to this experience, as someone with a Roblox-pilled 5-year-old.) Tom Scherschel’s kids are 10, 8, and 6 years old, and the vast majority of their game time is spent inside the sandbox that is Roblox. It’s not just older people who may have once played games. But the whole cat aspect is absolutely why it’s breaking out.” “That’s not to take anything away from the game, which I think is fantastic. “I really don’t think you can overstate the cat thing tbh,” said Whitta. In some ways, it’s an indictment of the medium’s most forward-facing creations, which largely fall into buckets of action or shooter games that can often seem alienating. Whitta’s father-in-law found it via the CNN segment, itself evidence of how Stray has caught the attention of people who probably know of video games but don’t engage with them regularly.
TABBY KITTENS CUTE PC
“My father-in-law, who I don’t believe has ever played a video game,” said Rogue One: A Star Wars Story screenwriter Gary Whitta, “asked me if his PC would run it. He downloaded a slightly sketchy-looking eBook that promises “all the information you require on the game,” and subsequently noted the frequency of Stray memes that started populating on Facebook.
Their father discovered the game after its trailer-many of which have millions of views on YouTube-in a family WhatsApp group and started doing some research. “I've showed him many games in person,” said Nicholls, “but this is the first time in the last decade or more he's gotten really excited about one.” And yet, Nicholls’ father, like many people in recent weeks, has found himself unexpectedly drawn to this new one. Their 64-year-old father, however, has not played a game in nearly 20 years. “ Stray seems to have hit it out of the park,” said Simon Carless, co-founder of the game discovery consultation firm GameDiscoverCo, “because it created a category-'3D cat exploration adventure'-that players really want, but didn't know they wanted.”įlorence Smith Nicholls, a PhD student in games AI, knows games well.