A couple of years ago, the ABC’s Good Game got in contact with a local animation studio to produce a series of shorts. Good Game‘s cancellation meant the animated skits were never broadcast, but you can now watch them all online.
Titled Loading Bar, the idea was to recreate a bar where video game characters would go and hang out in between quests, loading screens, levels, and so forth. The animations were created by Paper Moose, while the Good Game hosts (including executive producer Eliot Fish) provided the voices.
Seaton Kay-Smith, a writer/producer at Paper Moose, explained over email that he was doing some casual producing and writing for Good Game back in the day. “I wrote the scripts in the office, then they needed an animator, so I suggested Pete Foley at Paper Moose and to do the animation through them,” Kay-Smith said.
“We delivered the episodes to Good Game toward the end of the year, and then unfortunately, Good Game was cancelled so the episodes were put on the shelf, still needing music and a sound mix.”
With the show shelved, the episodes were just left in limbo. But because the ABC had no plans to do anything with them, Kay-Smith sought out the ABC’s permission to release the episodes online so fans could enjoy them nonetheless.
After going through the proper protocol, the ABC only had one stipulation: the videos had to be released for free. And earlier this month, with the broadcaster’s blessing, the episodes were uploaded to YouTube for all to enjoy.
Good Game lives on through Spawn Point, but shorts like this provide a nice memory of what was. For their part, Paper Moose continue working on a range of TVCs, short films, animations and other motion graphics for advertisers and agencies. Most of the work isn’t gaming related, although the agency did transform an area at Vivid Sydney into an 8-bit themed world, with a CRT TV using motion tracking to power a game of Pong for Vivid attendees to enjoy.
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