Victorian museum ACMI is set to open a dedicated exhibition spotlighting Untitled Goose Game‘s development and creation, and its impact on the local Australian games industry. Honk! Untitled Goose Exhibition will be a free exhibition open to everyone from 17 September 2024, as a lead in for Melbourne International Games Week celebrations.
Honk! will celebrate all of Untitled Goose Game‘s achievements while taking a deep, introspective look at its creation. Early sketches and concept art for the game will be displayed to the public, and installations within the exhibit will explore its links to slapstick comedy. Perhaps most notably, Honk! will also include playable prototypes – early versions of Untitled Goose Game available to the public for the first time.
As noted by ACMI, slices of these early versions were previously shown off at the museum, as part of playtesting events during the development of the game.
“As a museum of screen culture, video games are at the heart of what we do,” Seb Chan, ACMI director and CEO said of the new exhibition. “We’re honoured to give the goose the exhibition it deserves, revealing to audiences how it was made, and the wider cultural context it has come from.”
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In 2022, ACMI officially acquired Untitled Goose Game with the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia and the Powerhouse Museum, in recognition of its cultural importance. While the game is a slapstick comedy about a mean goose, its impact goes far beyond its premise.
Victorian Minister for Creative Industries Colin Brooks described it as “a local game that went on to conquer the world,” and that’s an apt statement. Untitled Goose Game made waves when it launched in 2019, with its humour and novelty buoying it to massive popularity in Australia and overseas. It helped to remind the world that Australia is a video game powerhouse, brimming with creative ideas.
“It’s a very strange privilege to see our work commemorated in a public exhibition,” Michael McMaster, co-director of House House said of the exhibit. “Though we design our games to be played by a wide audience, we never imagined that that design process might itself be made accessible within the walls of a gallery. It’s been such a pleasure working with ACMI to open up our sketchbooks and hard drives and present them to the public like this — we can’t imagine a better place to showcase our goose.”
Honk! Untitled Goose Exhibition will explore exactly how Untitled Goose Game conquered the world, and the subsequent waves it created in the games industry. The exhibition will open on 17 September 2024, and it’ll stick around ACMI until 16 February 2025.
