Goodbye Volcano High

Ko-op scales up for a bittersweet ode to youthful impulse

As anyone who’s ever been an awkward teenager knows, it takes guts to be yourself. This interactive drama follows a group of high-school-aged dinosaurs as they prepare to graduate and figure out who they want to be for the rest of their lives. Problem is, according to the news, the rest of their lives may not be that long. “Everybody knows what happened to the dinosaurs,” smiles Saleem Dabbous, studio director and co-director of Goodbye Volcano High.

It’s a fantastic, heartbreaking setup for a branching narrative game that explores how young people navigate turbulent times, and how we often rely on our peers to get us through. And there’s been plenty of that happening this year at Ko-op. In a huge moment for the small cooperative, Goodbye Volcano High was announced as part of PS5’s reveal event – and drew the ire of a crowd that decided this was a cynical attempt to imitate the success of games such as Night In The Woods. “Making such a personal game, you have to tune out a lot of those conversations,” Dabbous says. “Because when you start to factor that into how you’re making your game, you make compromises you wouldn’t have made otherwise. We put a lot of ourselves into this game, and we take our responsibility for telling this story really seriously.”