“Untitled Goose Game” is a game that runs on Nintendo Switch, Windows, Macintosh, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. The game released in 2019 has a very chaotic goose (you!) as the main character. There are a bunch of villagers wanting to peacefully go by their day and the goose keeps wrecking their jobs and lives, as it honks mindlessly.
Now, imagine if instead of you controlling the goose, someone else controlled it and the goose went about wrecking havoc as you kept desperately trying to get your work done. Well, karma sure does hit. An 18 year old developer Sam Chiet just induced this karma into an application. He created a windows based app, that is free and very easy to download. It comes as a .zip file and the moment you unzip it, the software loads on your computer and then comes up a lonely goose walking on your desktop. Soon, a couple more geese show up and they’re all dragging random goose memes and notepads titled “Not-epads” across the desktop, while leaving mud footsteps all over.
It’s all pretty peaceful, until you start seeing maybe 5 or 6 notes or images and they start to mess with your work. You try to close the files, but you fail to do so. “Why?”, you wonder. Well, trying to close down a window results in a goose taking control of your cursor, and more geese and pop ups keep showing up.
Chiet says, “I’m a big fan of things that are delightfully ridiculous, and that’s hopefully exactly what this is.”, continuing, he goes, “It’s a little desktop ‘assistant’ whose sole purpose is to get in the way of your work, and people are responding to it.”
This app was designed in only a few days and for fun; Sam says “I heard someone call Untitled Goose Game a power fantasy for timid people, and that’s basically the best way to put it. I’m going to mildly inconvenience the crap out of you.” It also helps to reminisce over the old computers, games and computer viruses. Talking about the internet of 1990s and early 2000s, Sam said, “I think they also had so much more personality. And even though what we have today is certainly very clean, usable software, I can’t help but feel like something was lost in that sanitization.”
Users can also customize the content they want their feed to be messed up with; this means that you can choose mp3 files, images and text that the geese bring up on your desktop.
Sam is not in any way affiliated with “Untitled Goose Game” developers and no one owns the copyrights to the Goose Game App.
You can download the app for yourself, or to prank a friend, here.
Images/Video: © SamNChiet
h/t: The Sun