Image from http://www.goat-simulator.com
In the not too distant past, an odd game came out under the name Goat Simulator 2014, the original game was originally made as a joke with no intention of becoming a full game during an game jam hosted by Coffee Stains Studios, the same company who worked on Sanctum. The game play features the player as a goat, in an incredibly and purposefully buggy world, where the only objective is to explore the broken physics of the world and smash everything in sight.
As lead developer Armin Ibrisagic put it, “[It's] an old school skating game, except instead of being a skater, you’re a goat, and instead of doing tricks, you wreck stuff”.
Once the game hit the virtual store of Steam, a large scale online game store, the game quickly gained a lot of attention and pre release hype. The game quickly raised enough money to finish ‘development’, intentional bugs and all, and the game was released earlier this year, seeing a large number of sales, adding to the large number of players who had already pre purchased the game prior to official release.
Now, in a parody of the original parody of ‘real’ game simulators, like the Surgeon Simulator games, another game has been slated for development by Strange Panther, this time under the even more asinine title Rock Simulator… 2014.
The game’s Steam description is a wonderfully vivid picture of exactly what the game sounds like, players “can watch beautiful rocks in any location in the world. From grass plains to salt flats, there are dozens of hand designed BEAUTIFUL environments.” Simply put, players watch a rock on their screen in various parts of the world. Hand designed rocks of course.
In a moment of jest, Strange Panther developer Ryan joked that if a game based on broken Goat physics could become popular, then certainly a game about watching a rock on the floor could be too. What Ryan did admit was that he did not expect the idea to actually catch on as much as it is now.
The game is already garnering a lot of votes on Steam’s Greenlight system, a voting system to ‘greenlight’ or give the OK by the community to officially release the game on Steam, taking the same path Goat Simulator did. The difference is that the new game will release for free, while Goat Simulator is currently selling at $7.99 USD on the Steam store.
It’s hard to imagine how much farther the simulation parodies will be taken, but hopefully the next latest craze will manage to be more interesting than watching rocks in their native habitats.
