Cleaning up the chaos in Goat Simulator: Remastered

Goat Simulator truly was the GOAT back in 2014. We’re not kidding. The first real gameplay footage, which can barely be considered a trailer, was watched over 2 million times in a couple of days. The footage of a clumsy goat butting everything and anything was the perfect intro to the janky world of Goat Simulator. 

The reaction to it turned a fun game jam experiment into a full-scale production at Coffee Stain Studios, who quickly realized they were onto something, and took the idea and ram—sorry, ran with it. 

Ten years on, it’s easy to see the impact Goat Simulator has had on the world of games. While it certainly wasn’t the first unusual simulator, it was the one that really kicked the genre into life. Now it feels like there isn’t a week that goes by without some other weird kind of simulator launching, and a lot of that is down to the success of Goat Simulator.

With a new remaster being unleashed, I chatted with Coffee Stain Studios about Goat Simulator’s long tail.  

“If our game has inspired people, then that’s fantastic, but equally I don’t think we can claim [sole] responsibility for the genre’s popularity,” says Joel Rydholm, an intern sound designer on the original game and now the game director for the remaster. “There were simulators before us after all, and I do genuinely believe it’s a popular genre due to its nature. It’s a genre that really resonates with audiences and allows them to step into something weird, or emulate a life with friends that might not be totally realistic but is really fun to play pretend.” 

The original Goat Simulator worked so well because everything you could do was funny. Smashing objects into random humans, trying to tackle a car head-on, or just bouncing around with the janky physics engine making things unpredictable; it was all just good fun. Your long-term enjoyment likely depended on how long this kept you laughing, but almost everyone who played seemed to get at least a few hours of fun out of it. 

“The barrier between idea and implementation into the game was extremely thin,” Rydholm says. “We would often have these meetings where we would just spitball ideas, disperse, and then the day after you would have all these different ideas in the game. The rule was: If it was funny, and you could implement it, then it could be in the game!” 

The love for the series and the overall joke remained strong enough to spawn a ton of DLC, ports to almost every platform you can imagine, and of course, and a bigger and better sequel that is confusingly named Goat Simulator 3. But now it’s time to return to the game that started it all, as Goat Simulator: Remastered is bringing back the original game with all its DLC in a brand-new remastered package that is the perfect way to experience this culturally significant game. 

“Ten years on, it’s great finally being able to make it the game we really want it to be and update it for a new audience,” says Rydholm. “The remaster ultimately hits two birds with one stone: It brings the old game back with a fresh coat of paint for our most nostalgic players and allows new players who might’ve started with Goat Simulator 3 to see where it all began.” 

For a game that is supposed to look less than realistic, a remaster might not be an obvious choice. But the two key areas that made this version a reality were the desire to combine all the original content into one package, including the previously mobile-only DLC pack, and to fix a lot of the issues the game had.

Given the original started life as a game jam project and development was quick to get it out of the door before the hype died down, there were a lot of features that never got fixed due to technical issues or just the sheer amount of time it would take to rewrite things from scratch. Now, all that work has been done, and the remaster should be much better for it. 

“The remaster has allowed us to work on our old gripes with the original game, as well as gripes that our players had,” Rydholm says. “For example, in the old game, you would have to quit out and restart if you wanted to switch goats in the middle of playing. Even then, this was kind of tedious, and not ideal when you’re in the middle of playing. So now we have a nifty in-game menu that lets you switch between all the mutators you’ve unlocked as well as see the things that you might have missed so you can easily jump back in and grab them all! It makes a huge difference to the flow of play.” 

Crucially, all the fun bugs that you remember have been left in, which apparently was one of the hardest challenges the team faced in the remaster, as re-creating bugs exactly is tougher than you might think. 

It might sound a little weird, but given the impact Goat Simulator had on the simulator genre, it is genuinely a very important game in the history of the medium, and now the remaster is the perfect chance to experience it for the first time or to jump back in and relive the memories you no doubt still have from 2014.