Push Me Pull You

Push Me Pull You is a sports game for four players.

BASICALLY you control one end of a sports-monster. Your partner controls the other (or you can try and control both at once)

BUT you can’t move the ball on your own, so you’ll need to coordinate and use your body to hold it

AND you can change the length of your body as you play!

BUT REMEMBER that you can push harder when your body isn’t stretched, so it’s better to use your head

AND YOU WIN BY keeping the ball in your half of the court so that it fills up. When it’s full, you score a point!

Pretty early on we all seemed to know that we wanted to make a sports game. We’d spent most of the year playing the already-seminal Sportsfriends games over and over and over, and had been talking a lot about how they seemed to herald an emergent genre: local-multiplayer video games that weren’t meant to simulate any specific real-life sports, but still grounded themselves by borrowing the formal qualities of contemporary sport (more on this emergent genre stuff to come in a later post).

We also knew that we wanted to make something funny (see: Pippin Barr, Bennett Foddy) which is probably what led to the inclusion of fleshy, humanoid tube-monsters? Before we’d settled on any real mechanical structure, it seemed pretty clear that there there was a very strange joy in trying to co-ordinate the movement of a wriggling two-headed worm alongside a friend (heavily informed by Keita Takahashi’s Noby Noby Boy, obviously) that we wanted to capitalise on.

Eventually we decided we’d call the game PUSH ME PULL YOU, and after a lot of design revisions (which we’ll outline later), it’s currently looking like this:

We are Michael, Nico, Jake and Stuart, four friends from Melbourne who like talking and thinking about video games.

In 2013 Nico made a video game about geometry, and Stu made one about looking at art. The time seemed right to all make one together.

So here we are - we decided to make a video game. We’ll blog about the whole thing. Wish us luck.