Curly heads to a restaurant and orders a bowl of oyster soup with crackers, but every time he tries to nab a spoonful of the soup, an apparently very fresh oyster eats the cracker. has worked to mitigate the rage-quit potential while maintaining the comedic value. The canonical text of slapstick comedy, The Three Stooges, can help us understand how Young Horses, Inc. Too hard? Rage-quitting all over the board, even if Octodad looks like a dancing tube man outside of a car dealership. “Trying to balance the level of physical comedy and intentional frustration is something that we’ve been tuning for three years now.” Too easy to control? The humor’s gone. “Trying to balance the level of physical comedy and intentional frustration is something that we’ve been tuning for three years now.” At what point does a game that centers on a difficult-to-control main character become too frustrating to pilot? To watch and revel in the joy of the unreal on YouTube is one thing, but experiencing it as a player is a whole other issue. So Octodad takes the surprise glitch encounter a step further: absurd physics are intentionally coded into the game. “There’s some inherent comedy in games doing what you don’t expect them to do,” says Murphy. These unexpected encounters with the impossible and the grotesque demystify games, injecting humor into an otherwise serious moment. The game has lived on in infamy on YouTube compilations: the player’s arm flails about gooily, and dinosaurs react to gunshots by sort of floating up and backwards. The game “was supposed to revolutionize AI and games and physics, but it ended up being this weird, accidentally hilarious thing.” But even Spielberg was an insufficient force to rescue Trespasser from mediocrity and buggy-ness. Meant to be a companion for the 1997 film The Lost World: Jurassic Park, the game’s development occurred in concert with Steven Spielberg himself and Minnie Driver, who voiced the main character. To say this game was overhyped would be an understatement.
Octodad is a “hard-to-control, awkward mess of a character,” according to John Murphy, a developer for Young Horses, Inc.Īccording to Murphy, Octodad drew its inspiration from unintentional comedic classics like the PC disaster Jurassic Park: Trespasser, released in 1998. That physical ineptitude is the focal point of Octodad ’s comedy. Think Being John Malkovich meets QWOP meets The Coneheads. Maintaining secrecy is easier said than done: octopi cannot navigate land so gracefully, we learn, and so Octodad wobbles around like a baby deer learning to walk. But said patriarch is secretly an octopus, forced to hide his true identity. The game centers on the patriarch of an excruciatingly normal family. Think Being John Malkovich meets QWOP meets The Coneheads.
It takes one glance at sophisticated game physics in its videogame contemporaries and throws a spanner in the real-world works. and one of only a handful of games that ventures deeply into the realm of comedic absurdity. Octodad is the sophomore videogame project for Chicago’s Young Horses, Inc. ) We are meant to imagine a one-to-one relationship between our world and that of the diegetic arena, and we are meant to imagine it seriously.Įnter Octodad: Dadliest Catch. (When they do attempt humor, as in the satire of Grand Theft Auto 5 or the low-brow yucks of Borderlands 2, it is far from sublime. The de-facto standard for commercially popular videogames involves killing, power, and physical mastery, scaffolded with weighty, impeccably constructed physics. These dramatic virtual tales rarely leave room for lighter moments. Or Bioshock, or Call of Duty, or Elder Scrolls, Battlefield, Mass Effect.
The most popular blockbuster videogame series are those that are politically fraught, emotionally affecting, visually affecting, and violent. Take, for example, Assassin’s Creed. Videogames take themselves pretty seriously.