It took indie hit Untitled Goose Game three months to sell 1 million copies. The news was proudly conveyed by Cabel Sasser, co-founder at Panic, the game’s publisher.
It seems impossible, but last week, three months after launch, Untitled Goose Game passed one million copies sold.
From the bottom of our hearts: thank you for playing our videogame.
— Cabel (@cabel) December 30, 2019
In Sasser’s words, “the reaction was beyond anything we could have imagined. The fan art, the writing, yes the memes, protest signs, Chrissy Teigen, Muppets?! It feels once-in-a-lifetime. We hope we brought some joy into your life, because you brought so much into ours. And we’ll never forget it.”
Untitled Goose Game came out on PC (Epic Games Store) and Nintendo Switch in September 2019. In December it was already available on PS4 and Xbox One. in expected to debut on Steam in the end of 2020.
One of this year’s biggest indie sucess stories, the game was born as a joke.
As the game’s creator Nico Disseldorp recalls, “in the middle of this kind of serious discussion about these ideas that had some substance to them, [designer Stuart Gillespie-Cook] posted an image in our group chat and said, “Let’s make a game about this.” And he just posted a stock photograph of the goose.”
People think game development means you get to play games all day, but they’re wrong – it means you talk about geese pic.twitter.com/I8XvTWy7b1
— Michael McMaster (@mjmcmaster) August 11, 2016
“At some point, we realized we were more interested in the joke game idea — the one that we weren’t going to do — than any of the ideas that we’d been taking seriously. So, one morning we just decided, Okay, look, let’s stop, and let’s just try and make the Goose Game. Let’s see what happens.”