Disco Bear is an interactive narrative that follows a polar bear through tragedy, depression, and his journey back to the dance floor. There are three parts to the narrative, each of which features a number of dancing and dialogue sequences that the player may interact with.
About Disco Bear
Disco Bear is the heartfelt story of a bear being asked to dance once again. A new groove of comedy game and winner of “Best Bear of E3 2017” – this 10min drama explores new styles of interactive humor, and might just pull a few heartstrings along the way. Between its colorful graphics, silly reactions, wild lineup, and stock photography like it’s going out of style, Disco Bear is the dancing bear game you’ve been waiting for. Play it free on desktop browsers today!
Developer’s Artistic Statement
Disco Bear is an appeal to both a particular type of humor, as well as an effort to expand the capability of games as a unique medium. Its interactive comedy gameplay (if you can call it that) does not have an objective or goal, but more like a toy than a game, it provides an outlet for fun digital interactions. These interactions are specifically meant to invoke ridiculous and delightful comedy rather than sarcastic, dark humor, satire, or anything else. By combining these two elements, Disco Bear hopes to bring gamers and game players who enjoy this type of humor something new and exciting.
The humor is specific to our tastes – brainstorm sessions included Sonic Adventure 2: Battle, SpongeBob references, talk of South Park’s Butters tap dancing episode, and a general entertainment by the idea of dancing bears. Collin’s Bear is actually the strongest influence, a 16 second YouTube 3d animation of a terrible dancing bear that got three million views across a decade. We saw it as the type of humor we wished to capture.
The interactive comedy elements then come from more of a rebellion against the idea that only one type of comedic gameplay currently existed – the awkward physics game. It is incredible that QWOP, Octodad, and Surgeon Simulator all evoke procedural comedy through interaction, but we believed interaction could provide more unique forms of comedy. A series of prototypes and recalling Super PSTW RPG led to the decision to make a series of simple but delightful and ridiculous responses to users’ interactions. It is almost enough to be performative, but primarily it is there to entertain in response to the user’s continued willingness to participate. Each interaction rewards and routinely delights the player, giving humor as a reward for being active.
With these elements combined, Disco Bear delights through interaction to invoke a new type of comedy through gameplay, or at the least, expand on and formalize the ideas of Super PSTW into a scope and range that has never been seen before.
