How COVID Led To Big Walk, One of This Year’s Best Video Games

Hello one, take Shrier here. Today we're going to tell the story of Big Walk, one of the best games of 2026 and a game that would not exist if not for the COVID pandemic. Today, I'm going to tell you the six-year story behind this incredible, joyful video game. Have you played it? Have you played Big Walk? If you're not familiar, it is a cooperative game that you play online with um between the player count can be between two and I believe it goes up to 12. 12, I imagine, is a little bit chaotic. And essentially, you are going on a hike with your friends. You are exploring this massive island that is modeled after an Australian park. and you walk around this world with your friends and you engage in these puzzles with the game, what what the developers of the game called challenges um which are often about communication because

the key to this game is that you can only talk through proximity chat. The game warns you before you start, don't use Discord, don't use any sort of phone calls or other voice chat because the whole point of this game is to use proximity chat and to communicate the way the game wants you to. Because as you are playing, the game will give you all sorts of these challenges that force you to communicate with your friends and co colleagues who are you are playing with in all sorts of unexpected ways. I finished through this game over the course of a whole bunch of sessions, five or six sessions with my Tripleclick podcast co-hosts, Kirk Hamilton and Manny Meyers. And I was so enamored, and I'm still so enamored that I decided to reach out to the developers at Australian game studio House to find out more about how this game was created. So, this is all for a story that I ran for Bloomberg today. So, go check that out. link is in the show notes. As

always, I've provided a gift link so you can check it out without a pay wall in your way. It all starts in 2020. House, which was at the time a studio of four people, now has since grown to five, which is 25% growth. Massive, massive growth spike there going from four to five people. Um, they had just released a game that you might have heard of called Untitled Goose Game, where you play as this rambunctious bird who must cause chaos wherever it goes. Runs into a farmer, all sorts of havoc along the way. Untitled Goose Game was a big hit. Sold more than a million copies um in its first couple of months on sale. It helped ensure that House House was financially secure. So, in 2020 when the pandemic hit, uh, the people at House didn't have to worry about making a paycheck, but they did have the same sort of social isolation woes that

everybody else in the world who was locking down and staying home did during those days of 2020. So, they did what a lot of people did. They played a lot of online video games together, a lot of um multiplayer games, a lot of shooters, games like Overwatch. And they found that they were getting particular enjoyment out of the lobbies, the waiting rooms of these multiplayer games, like in Overwatch, how you are just kind of hanging out with your teammates before a match starts and you can just jump on on top of each other and communicate without any words. At the same time, some of the people at House House were thinking a lot about Zoom chats, these massive video calls that a lot of us were doing during the pandemic. Um, some of you might remember, I don't know, birthday parties on Zoom. I remember my wife put on a a surprise birthday party for me on Zoom. That was like 20, 30 people, something like that on this big Zoom call. and how um kind of awkward they can be because anytime one person talks, all other 20

people have to stop talking. And um the people at House kept thinking about how cool it would be, how how much more convenient it would be if you could just have little side chats in these Zoom calls, kind of like a proximity chat sort of thing where maybe a few people could break off on Zoom and just talk to one another. Um, as 2020 went along, as the pandemic went along, they started thinking about a lot of these ideas and they put aside a game idea that they had been thinking about as their kind of follow-up to Untitled Goose Game and instead started working on this prototype for what would eventually become known as Big Walk. So, that's what I'll call it. And in this early prototype, you would essentially just explore an island with your friends. And it had proximity chat. So, it was this big kind of open spacious terrain with mountains and trees and whatnot and you'd go around with your friends and uh you could only talk to them if you were in the same vicinity proximity chat. So, if someone got too far ahead, you wouldn't be able to speak to them

anymore. You wouldn't be able to communicate with them directly anymore. And as they were playing around with this prototype and they brought in um uh one of their friends, Clanica Quigley, who would eventually become that fifth member of House House, they brought her in to check it out and they found that they were just having a blast with this thing. There wasn't anything to do in this prototype except for walk and talk to each other. But it was so much fun. They were strolling together. They found that they were just getting into high jinks along the way because of this proximity chat. And like they would slow down, people would slow down to so that other people could catch up so they could all stick together. Sometimes if someone got lost, it would just kind of create chaos as they tried to find one another and uh be able to communicate with one another and then they had that amazing feeling of satisfaction. That will sound familiar to anyone who's played the final game where once you finally found someone after 5 minutes of searching uh and you could hear each other, it was just bam, instant endorphin rush. It was like, "Ah, we found each other." Um they found that they were addicted to this. It was unlike anything they'd done before. And

it was also it was capable of creating stories in a way that I think they hadn't found other games to be which I mean one of the coolest thing about video games as a medium is the way that they allow for player generated story. Stories that you can tell um you can create you can go and share with friends afterwards that are really stuff that just kind of emerges from the gameplay what gameplay designers might call emergent gameplay. Emerge emergent. Um, so soon enough they decided, hey, this is going to be our next big game. And they started adding puzzles, um, challenges, as I mentioned before. Um, they started thinking about what are some ways we can, uh, just kind of have people learn how to communicate in unorthodox ways. So, for example, one puzzle might have um have uh your group split up into two different rooms. And in one of those rooms, you can see a bunch of icons, and in the other room, you have to place those icons in the correct order. And in the first room, you have to communicate what those icons

are just using kind of words uh as as careful words as you can to describe abstract shapes. So, one of them might be just kind of a slant with lines on it, and you might be like, "Oh, it kind of looks like a division sign." and so on and so forth. Um, another puzzle might have one person standing with a telescope and another person have to go half a mile in the distance and then make some hand gestures to signal to the person with the telescope what they are seeing so that the person with a telescope can put um icons in the correct order. If you played Big Walk, this will sound very familiar. And um from there, I mean, they kept expanding, kept adding new puzzles to the equation, kept adding new ideas. They started adding items as development went on. You had your um your walkietalkies, so two people could communicate with one another, even if they weren't next to each other. You could actually split up and explore the island um without worrying about losing track of where you were. Um, they added flare guns so you could kind of pop a a flare up into the

air in case you got lost and then your friends could come find you. They added noise makers so people could just irritate the heck out of everybody cuz why not? Um, and the more the game expanded, the more grew uh, and the more fun that the people at House House had making it, um, the longer it started taking. Um, it also I mean the people at House House also they told me that they took a nice little break in 2021 after as the pandemic subsided um because they hadn't gotten a chance to take a break after making Untitled Goose Game and then into the pandemic. So, they decided to take a break then which also added a little bit of time but still the game just kept growing and growing and growing. Um uh I'm going to give a a little quote from uh co-founder of House House, Jake Straer, one of the for the five members. quote, "The game becoming more dense and varied definitely expanded the breadth of story that could happen." I think we were aware of that magic pretty early on. Um, as you solved each one of these puzzles, you would get um this kind of gourd looking thing. I

call it a gourd. Some people have other names for it. My group called it a gourd. And um the for each of those you collected or there were kind of these different uh gates that you would have to um pass along the way and you could you'd have to collect essentially five of them to solve one of these gates and then you would get to these towers and once you brought five of them to a tower you would unlock something cool and uh the developers started kind of finding ways to dole out rewards to you along the way that felt satisfying and rewarding and made it feel like you were making progress as you went. So, for example, one tower might unlock uh a ski lift, which could let you just kind of take this giant chair lift across the island and and um move to different locations. Uh unlock new locations. Um another one unlocked a series of tunnels uh throughout the map. Um there's a train. Um other stuff that I won't spoil, and I certainly won't spoil the ending because the ending of this game is truly a phenomenal experience. Um, and so they were started to they they

got a little bit nervous along the way as the game grew and they kept working on it and kept working on it. Um, they spent so much time on this thing. By the way, I'll I'll give you a great quote about that in a second. But they got a little bit nervous because at this point in like 2022, 2023, um it seemed like uh an obstacle, a big obstacle to convince people to um that that in order to play this game, they would have to get their friends to play it with them and it could only be played online because Big Walk would never work as a couch co-op game. You could not stay at home and play this with your spouse or your kids because it was all about proximity chat. So if you could sit in the same room and talk to each other, every single puzzle would be ruined. So it was a bit of a barrier for entry. Um convincing people to get online, play with their friends, play cooperatively, get a group together, um schedule sessions to play it. Um so they were a little bit nervous about that. Um but still the game kept growing. Um at one point they actually

uh they were testing out the game with people and they built this big wall in the middle of the island. And the idea of this wall was like, hey, we're going to put up this thing so that one part of the island has all the finished puzzles, the puzzles that we have done and completed and are ready for play testing. And the other part of the island has all the stuff we're still working on, so we can just kind of tinker away on that part. And when we have play testers come in and play the build, they can just stay on on the finished side of the wall. Um, but they grew to love this wall so much that they actually left it in the game. And if you play Big Walk, you will see this big old wall on one side of the island, and it wound up turning into this kind of this um this gate for the endgame content. Uh which is a a fun fun little uh little tidbit. It added this kind of sense of foroding and mystery to the world, they were telling me. Um so the game kept growing. They kept adding more and more challenges, kept thinking of fun ideas for puzzles that they threw into the game. And if you play the game, you've experienced some of these ridiculous, incredibly fun puzzles along the way. everything from like having to divvy up

your party so they can each watch monitors um and you have coverage of all these monitors which are displaying these symbols and you have to count the number of times that they're displayed um to like massive playgrounds and obstacle courses. There's one incredible puzzle where you really have to just kind of um take this object and throw it up upwards up this big obstacle course. Super fun. And all sorts of other ideas. Um I'm going to give you a great quote. This is from Nico Disseldorf who is another co-founder of House House and he told me [snorts] quote if someone had appeared and told us it would take 6 years we would have pulled the plug. I think you have to lie to yourself in video games and tell yourself first of all we'll work on it for 3 months and then after that maybe it'll be a year maybe it'll be 3 years at no point did I think it was going to take 6 years which I think is a familiar story in the world of video games. Um, it helped that House House kind of stuck to their vision. They never changed course from that original prototype. The idea was always

the same. They just stayed small and they made a ton of stuff which is why it took ultimately six years, six years to make this game because they just kept throwing ideas and content at it and they refused to grow beyond their five core members. They brought in a couple of other people for like audio and play testing and helping out, but they refused to grow beyond the five core members. Um, quote, this is a quote from Strasser. Quote, "We're not interested in expansion. We're happy to make games that fit a studio that is the size we are, which meant we were never going to overstretch ourselves." By the way, again, these quotes were all told to me for a Bloomberg article, Bloomberg interview, which you could read in the show notes. Um, by the way, if this story is sounding familiar, and I think it might be to some of you, it's because it's very reminiscent of a certain other Australian studio that stayed small, that stuck to their original vision, that used the financial gains that they had on their first hit game to make a follow-up that was just everything they

wanted it to be and took their sweet time. They thought it was going to be a couple of years, but it just kept growing and growing and growing and eventually became a game of the year contender. That game of course is Hollow Night Silk Song. Very similar story all the way down to their country of origin. Um, and then something funny happened with Big Walk and to the developers of Big Walk, which is that in 2025 or so, maybe 2024, 2025, um, cooperative games became the hottest trend in the video game industry thanks to this genre that is kind of maybe affectionately, maybe derogatively called Friendlop. Um, games like Peak and RV There yet and many others began to dominate Steam. um they took over Twitch, they became quoteunquote streamer bait, um sold millions of copies thanks to their viral slapstick moments. And one of the reasons, and I think an important distinction here, one of the reasons that they were called Friends Slop, um

again in in kind of an affectionate/ derogatory way, maybe a bit of both, is that a lot of those games were made on very short timelines within a few months, and they came out with a lot of glitches. And glitches were sometimes part of the fun. And sometimes part of what led to them being so viral on streaming sites and video sites and social media is cuz there's a lot of just ridiculous um errors that would happen and that just contributed to the general enjoyment of those games. Big Walk is absolutely not friend slop. It was made in six years and it was made in a very polished way. You play this game, there are not glitches, there are not a lot of bugs. In fact, everything feels very sleek and smooth, polished. Like I said, in fact, I would say that Big Walk feels more like a Nintendo game than some of the Friends slop that you've seen online. Bigwalk came out in August of this year, and it was instantly a hit, got rave reviews, has done

extraordinarily well. In fact, the developers told me that it has now sold more than 2 million copies, making it another big hit for House House following Untitled Goose Game. Um, like I said before, I played through the entire game, got through the ending. I haven't 100%ed it yet. Got to convince Kirk and Maddie to hop on hop back on with me. Maybe when we're through this deluge of fall games, we can check it out some more. But we had My laundry is ready. Um, we had such a good time playing through this game that I just keep thinking about it and especially thinking about that ending. Again, I will not spoil what happens in the end sequence of this game, but it is so satisfying to play through and feels like such a culmination of all of the things that you've learned and experienced over the course of the game, especially if you play through the entire game and then the ending with the same group of players. It is just such a blast. And um uh I think that like a lot

of people have made comparisons between Big Walk and Destiny raids. And I think that's a good point of comparison because just like Destiny raids, Big Walk places you in these situations where maybe you'll see um a terrain or a room and you'll see some objects and you'll have to figure out with your friends what to do and you'll just do a little bit of trial trial and error to see what what is going on and what your ultimate objective is. But for some reason, unlike Destiny, Big Walk never feels punishing when something goes wrong, when something goes ary. In Destiny, if you are raiding with your friends and you screw up, uh you feel like garbage. You're just like, man, I've let down my team. Whereas in Big Walk, if you are playing with your friends and you screw up, uh it just is hilarious for everybody. At one point, the three of us were playing and one of us fell off of a mountain. Um, which kind of derailed our carefully laid out plans for that evening, but it was so funny that we were just cracking up the

whole time trying to find one another. Um, if someone gets lost, and the developers of BigWalk told me that it's intentional that people should be getting lost. Um, it just winds up adding to the experience. You never really feel like you're wasting your time, even when you are quote unquote wasting your time. Um, you never feel like it's too repetitive or anything like that. There's no fail state like there is in Destiny. It is just an overall positive experience and I really can't recommend it enough. So, what's next for House House and the creators of Big Walk? Well, um they told me they're not sure. They said that first they're focusing on fixing bugs. Um doing updates that will just kind of fix any glitches they found. Um and then perhaps they're going to think about doing updates for Big Walk. um they're not at a point where they like have all these great ideas for new games because Big Walk was so good at just kind of absorbing ideas that all the ideas that they thought of over the last 6 years, they just threw into Big Walk. And you

can really tell as you're wandering around this world and finding puzzles and finding challenges and exploring. You can tell that this is a game that they crammed every possible idea into it. So, what is next? They're not sure. Might be new updates for Big Walk. might be something else. We shall see. But in the meantime, highly recommend Big Walk. It is such a delightful experience. Definitely one of my favorite games of the year so far. Maybe my favorite. Not sure yet. I'll have to figure that out. But I absolutely love it. Cannot recommend it enough. And here's hoping that the next game from House House doesn't take another six years. I'll see you all next time.