Why make a game about a goat? “Because they’re way funnier than cats,” says Coffee Stain co-founder and CEO Anton Westbergh, firmly. “Goats are the funniest animal by far.”
It turns out the internet agrees. When it arrived in 2014, Goat Simulator was a sensation, first rocketing to the top of the PC charts, then the App Store charts, racking up millions of YouTube views along the way. And it’s a wonder the game even got made.
Coffee Stain was formed by a gang of friends from Sweden’s University of Skövde, who set up their studio in 2010 with ambitious plans to release six games a year. They ended up making one, a cute App Store platformer called I <3 Strawberries. Sci-fi strategy games Sanctum and Sanctum 2 followed on PC, and kept the studio afloat for a while.
But with no new release imminent, the money started drying up in early 2014. “We had about 12 months of money left in the bank and we had to make something,” says Westbergh. “There was one idea about making a game about a goat – the stupidest idea – and when we started crossing ideas off the list that were too big or too risky, it was still there. Half the team hated it, and half the team loved it.”
At the time, Truck Simulator and Farming Simulator had become weirdly popular. Also, the team were constantly passing around videos of goats. Why not combine the two? It was decided: they’d spend a month on the game to see if it might come together. “After two weeks we had a goat in a grass field running around doing stupid things…our PR guy at the time put up a YouTube video and then we went home.”
We had about 12 months of money left in the bank and we had to make something.
Anton Westbergh, Coffee Stain
The next morning, the team awoke to discover the video had already picked up 100,000 views. The next day, it doubled. Then it doubled again. By the end of the week, it had two million views.
“We had this big crisis meeting – we knew we had to make it into a real game,” recalls Westbergh. “It wasn't really a game at that point…people were saying that they wanted to buy it right now and that was our biggest problem.”
They decided to just do one month’s more work on the game and just release it, in a barely functioning state, on April 1st. On PC it shot to top of the charts; by September, the rather more complete App Store version arrived and Goat Simulator got even bigger. “It was huge,” says Westbergh. “Now mobile is the biggest platform for us.”
Legions of YouTubers and streamers covered the game, and it even ended up on the cover of the Wall Street Journal as the poster child of the power of virality. Several spin-offs quickly arrived in its wake: MMO Simulator mocked the world of online fantasy games, GoatZ riffed on survival game DayZ and Waste Of Space took our hoofed friends intergalactic.
And yet Westbergh is extremely humble about the game’s achievements, and is keen to make it clear that its creation was a team effort. A very badly organised one. “If you wanted a feature in the game, you just added it,” says Westbergh. “You didn’t need anyone’s approval. I think that’s actually an important thing – everyone just put things in they just thought were funny.”
Westbergh sums up the game’s development as “deliberate chaos”. It resulted in a game full of janky slapstick and bizarre vignettes that have become internet gold. Goat Simulator proves that chaos and creativity can lead to wonderful things. And that maybe goats are funnier than cats.