A plucky group of LGBTQ video game developers is proceeding with their latest project, a video game featuring non-binary and queer characters, despite a long and ongoing harassment campaign against it by bigoted trolls.
The game, Goodbye Volcano High, involves Fang, a non-binary dinosaur and rock band member who is forced to choose between family, friends, and romance during their senior year, just as an asteroid is headed to kill all the dinos on Earth.
The small, Montreal developer co-operative called KO_OP describe the game as “a hybrid cinematic narrative/rhythm game/coming of age/interactive movie experience.” But ever since it was first announced at a 2020 Sony digital showcase, KO_OP has become targeted by a group of anti-LGBTQ trolls from 4chan, an anonymous bulletin board website.
The trolls targeted the game because of its LGBTQ-inclusiveness, using its distinctive cartoon art to make hateful, violent, and often NSFW images mocking the game’s queerness.
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The trolls also began posting these images and leaving hateful messages in “raids” on KO_OP’s Discord, a community chat platform. It forced KO_OP to make their Discord group a private one. Now, prospective users must apply and agree to an anti-harassment pledge, though harassers still occasionally make it through.
“The reality is that if you are making a game with queer characters…you will face harassment no matter where you go,” KO_OP said in a July email newsletter to its Discord members.
Even worse, a group of the 4chan trolls calling themselves Cavemanon stole images of the game that KO_OP had released and used them to make an anti-LGBTQ, alt-right-leaning spoof of their game called Snoot Game. Not only did the spoof come out before Goodbye Volcano High, it’s also filled with anti-queer messaging, according to Kotaku.
In it, Fang is a “confused teenager who eventually de-transitions with help from the player,” the publication reports. Like the original game, it features different endings based on your choices. Unlike the original game, one of those endings involves Fang shooting up her high school — a scenario based on the aforementioned art mocking the original game.
While the team at KO_OP told Kotaku that they experience “a significant amount of direct transphobic and homophobic harassment that persists to this day,” they’re not letting that harassment stop them from completing the game.
The developers said it will come out this year.
“Goodbye Volcano High is being made by members of the communities represented in it,” KO_OP wrote the aforementioned publication. “We care deeply about the work we are doing … and we can’t wait for everyone to experience Fang’s story when Goodbye Volcano High launches.”
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