The “end of an era, coming of age” love story about teenage dinosaurs facing the end of their world, Goodbye Volcano High, has been delayed to an unspecified date in 2022 amid a narrative reboot that began shortly after the game’s announcement back in June 2020. The team at KO_OP also wants to avoid crunching to finish the game this year, particularly with the pandemic that has and continues to affect all aspects of game development.
You can read the full statement on the delay from the team below:
In addition to Global Events™️, 2020 saw us rebooting the narrative of our game. Those two factors have delayed our release timeline. So we are making what we’re sure is by now an expected announcement: Goodbye Volcano High will be a 2022 title, not a 2021 one.
It’s been a really hard year for many reasons, and the mental and physical health of the team has to come first. We don’t want to crunch, and we don’t want to put ourselves in stressful situations to finish the game by 2021 when we can take a little more time. We love the community that we’ve fostered through developing Goodbye Volcano High, and we hope it isn’t too much of a bummer to have to wait a little longer for the dino drama.
Thank you to those who have been supporting us since day one and to those who have joined us along the way. We really appreciate you and your support. We love making this game and we’re lucky we have a chance to make it!
Goodbye Volcano High, a narrative anime drama about a group of dinosaurs, was first announced at a PlayStation showcase in June 2020. It was initially met with some controversy due to writer Kate Gray’s history with a controversial article on Kotaku that included pornographic depictions of fictional characters who were minors (link to former Kotaku EIC Stephen Totillo’s apology for the article). While discussion of the narrative reboot doesn’t explicitly mention the controversy surrounding Gray, she does not appear to be writing on the game anymore, and the timing of seeking a new narrative team for Goodbye Volcano High lines up with its June 2020 announcement and subsequent controversy.
The new Goodbye Volcano High narrative team comes from Sweet Baby Inc. Kim Belair, Camerin Wild, and Paula Rogers were tasked with sifting through the pieces of the existing narrative to figure out how they could rewrite things while accounting for all the pieces of the game that were already deep in development—animations completed, gameplay sequences mapped, assets developed, etc. In the end, after some clever reverse engineering of elements that already existed, they’ve found a story they are really happy with that is in “a place where the story feels fully and confidently [their] own.” You can read the full interview with the Sweet Baby team about the process of rebooting a narrative in progress.
Goodbye Volcano High is coming to PS5, PS4, and Steam sometime in 2022.
