Update: An earlier version of this story listed High on Life songs as 33.5 million video views and 77.6 million impressions. This included views and impressions for content posted prior to Gamescom. This has now been amended so that the figures quoted only apply to content posted during Gamescom.
A week after Gamescom kicked off Opening Night Live on August 23, it’s pretty clear that the show’s unexpected social media hit was High on Life from Rick and Morty creator Justin Roiland’s Squanch Games. Set to release on December 13 for PC and Xbox, it’s a first-person shooter wrapped in the same kind of dark-comedy craziness found in previous Roiland games like Trover Saves the Universe and Accounting. Squanch Games’ creative director Mikey Spano describes it as “Bladerunner as Jim Henson did”, comparing the bounty hunting gameplay to Metroid Prime. Stage wise, it’s an acquired taste, and frankly, it wasn’t on our Gamescom bingo map of games we thought we’d be talking about right now.
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A week after Gamescom, on IGN channels alone, content about High on Life has seen more than 24 million video views and a whopping 56 million impressions (“impressions” are a measure of how many people have seen posts about the game in their social feeds). .) In comparison, Dune Awakening – the next most popular title we covered – only saw 8.6 million impressions.
High on Life was not an exclusive or world premiere at Gamescom. When Microsoft announced it on its Xbox and Bethesda Showcase in June, it performed quite well. In the two months since, the trailer has gradually been viewed 348 thousand times on our YouTube channel. It’s definitely been on our radar, but it’s barely taken the lead this year when it comes to potential hits. If you had asked someone “what’s going to be big in the fourth quarter?” no one “High on Life” would have said.
When new gameplay footage, featuring a very extensive boss fight, dropped last week during Gamescom’s Opening Night Live show, things went well and after a week it managed to make its way past the 100,000 views on IGN’s YouTube channel. It was certainly not the most successful performance of the evening. That honor fell to the Pinnochio-themed Soulslike Lies of P, which quickly cracked a million views on the same channel.
On August 24, Joe Skrebels, executive news editor of IGN, got to play High on Life at Gamescom and posted 25 minutes of footage (recorded above) for a hands-on preview showing the gameplay leading up to the boss fight shown in the trailer. . This further demonstrated how close to Roiland-isms the game’s dialogue would be. The footage — which was completely unedited with no voiceover, just game audio — was viewed 1.3 million times on IGN’s YouTube channel.
From this, we cut segments that we posted on TikTok, Twitter, and Instagram, starting with the introduction of “Knifey” – the boisterous knife/chain creature that sounds like Australian Rick as he yells out “needs more stitches! ” That clip has now been viewed 7.6 million times on TikTok and was initially received enthusiastically for its obvious Rick and Mortyness. There was some understandable grumbling that it wouldn’t be coming to PlayStation, but initial reactions were generally positive.
Then things took a negative turn. Roiland’s approach can be divisive at the best of times and, as with the Rick and Morty discourse, people were quick to complain that the humor was predictable and crude. Some complained that Roiland’s approach is getting old. The main criticism was that talking weapons are annoying, and comparisons were made to talking weapons in the Borderlands series. It’s worth pointing out that talking companions in general have been the rage of some players since Navi regularly updated Link in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Paimon – a similar character – may be too common for some in Genshin Impact.
On August 26, we cut another High on Life scene from the gameplay footage to show how meta becomes the humor in response to an avid fan comment. The scene, in which a cycloptic-child-alien thing challenges you to shoot it while your weapon, Kenny, berates you, saw an additional 4.7 million views on TikTok and 6 million on Twitter. “Normally it’s not allowed to kill children during games, but he’s dead. We killed this boy,” wails goop-shooting Kenny. “There goes our E for Everyone rating!” That single tweet saw 28 million impressions over the next three days. The discussion wasn’t about the “joke,” it all boiled down to gaming on Twitter finding Roiland’s work incredibly polarizing. 9 Volts in summary the sentiment perfect, saying “we managed to make a game even more annoying than Borderlands”, a tweet that quickly got 116,000 likes. Patricia Hernandez. from Kotaku called it “the embodiment of cringe.” However, the more people found it “unfunny”, the more Roiland fans showed up to defend it. While this was happening, Google Trends, which measures how many people search for a particular keyword or topic, showed that search interest in High on LIfe rose to its all-time high.
It seems that High on Life isn’t afraid to push the boundaries of video game decency. #gamescom2022 pic.twitter.com/bgC6UinyVz
— IGN (@IGN) August 26, 2022
A day later, on August 27, Spano and executive producer Matty Studivan spoke to Max Scoville at our Gamescom live show to explain that the game wouldn’t be as chatty as this early look would have us believe. “It can feel like it’s shooting at you all the time,” Studivan explained. “At this level, we’re trying to teach you a lot of things, so we have a lot to tell you, but as the levels open up, it’s important for Justin and Mikey to find the moments of calm, where you explore and…where you can see how ridiculous the game is.”
Interestingly, while we saw more people looking for information about High on Life, watching videos and talking about it in all the places we post, it’s unclear if this has changed anyone’s mind about wanting to play it when it comes out later in the year. . While Gamescom had a huge impact on what people added to their wish lists on IGN Playlist, High on Life didn’t make the top five of the week. The most wanted game was (predictably) Lies of P, followed by Dead Island 2, Atlas Fallen, Dune Awakening and Where Winds Meet.
The top five wishlist games on the Playlist the week after Gamescom did not include High on Life
In the end, the reason High on Life could steal Gamescom had little to do with the fact that it was a video game. It’s a testament to comedy’s ubiquity – and perhaps a response to Rick and Morty’s particular kind of humor. Everyone can have an opinion about whether something is funny, but the discourse surrounding a game like Lies or P requires an understanding of whether it could play like Bloodborne. The challenge for High on Life, as for Monkey Island, Goat Simulator, The Stanley Parable, Psychonauts and others before it, is to find a way to meet the needs of gamers while being accessible enough for people who just looking for a good laugh.
John Davison is VP, publisher at IGN. follow him Twitter.
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