Goodbye Volcano High is a narrative
adventure game. The player drops in
when graduation is on the horizon and
the protagonist, Fang, needs to make a
decision about where they want their life
to go. “What this game is really about,”
says Saleem Dabbous, studio director
and Goodbye Volcano High co-director,
“is asking yourselves, if you knew
everything was going to come to
an end, what would you do with
that time? What are the choices
that you would make? And who
would you want to be?”
KO_OP isn’t quite ready to go into great
detail about how the game will play, but it’s
keen to stress that player choice will be
important. Things go much deeper than
‘path A or path B’, as co-director and
animation director Kyle McKernan
explains: “There’s [a] choice of pursuing
newer things versus your really close
friendships or relationships, or your family,
or your music, it all interweaves and adds
up as the story goes on.”
Ah yes, the music. The audio will be an
important part of Goodbye Volcano High
(“we think audio and music is what makes
an emotional lasting connection,” says
Dabbous). Fang is in a band, VVORMDRAMA, with their best friend Trish – and
their music will be featured in the game.
The idea of potentially prioritising the band
over personal relationships is certainly a
very interesting one.
It’s the nature of KO_OP as an
artist-owned and -run studio, though,
which gives Goodbye Volcano High its
true heart. There have been no barriers to
infusing the game with the identities of the
people who made it. “[KO_OP is] made up
of a lot of queer people, and a lot of trans
people,” says Dabbous. “We’re able to
have those elements be a part of the world
and the story and the characters ... we
don’t have to fight for that, and we don’t
have to necessarily centre that either.
They’re just a part of our world as a given.”THIS IS THE END
Development began in 2018, and the idea
was always to give the story something of
an apocalyptic vibe. The end of an era in
terms of graduation from high school; the
fact that the characters are dinosaurs,
which as we know went extinct; the
pressures of making important life
choices... stress, endings, and the
unknown were always in the mix.
And then, 2020 happened.
“Since [2018] things [have
become] more and more dire,
in terms of just like our political
climate, our ecological crisis,” explains
Dabbous. “There’s a lot of things out
there that feel like these looming huge
issues that are almost cataclysmic,
right? And we’re just like, OK, what is our
responsibility as creators to tell narratives
that capture this feeling in time? ... I think
that we’re trying to ask ourselves, like,
what does it mean to exist at the end of an
era? What does it look like? And what is
your personal responsibility?”
The coronavirus pandemic has proven
to be an instructive lesson in how humans
react to cataclysmic events (for good or
bad), but it also means, as Dabbous puts
it, “We have to make sure that it’s not read
as a straight COVID [commentary].”
McKernan adds, “I think that a really
interesting balance to try to strike, is
that we’re trying to treat the subject as
responsibly as we can and with as much
weight as it warrants, while still having
our own kind of world.”
Luke KempY
ou’d be forgiven for thinking that, of
the many things a game about dinosaurs
that go to high school is likely to be,
‘relatable’ isn’t one of them. Yet you
would be wrong. Despite the dinos, this is set to be
a game that tells a deep, surprisingly human story.It’s time to play triceratops trumps
GOODBYE
VOLCANO HIGH
“WE THINK AUDIO AND MUSIC
IS WHAT MAKES AN EMOTIONAL
LASTING CONNECTION”RELEASE
2021DEVELOPER
KO_OPPUBLISHER
In-houseLINK
goodbyevolcanohigh.comNEED TO KNOWNEW
INFOTails round the campfire.Goodbye Volcano High
PREVIEW
Volcano High, before
saying goodbye.