🥸 Play the First Marx Bros Video Game

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We did it! Hooray for Captain Spaulding us!

After a month of hard work, some of it while on relaxication, Gwen Katz and I released Cocoanut Hotel, a wacky hotel management simulator based on The Cocoanuts (1929), the first film by The Marx Brothers.

🏨 Play Cocoanut Hotel! (It’s free!)

After playing, if you have a moment, please take a super short 5 question player survey to let us know your thoughts. Game development and player feedback are inextricably linked, like yin and yang, or Toe Jam and Earl.

One surprising discovery about our game: I’m reasonably certain Cocoanut Hotel is the first ever fully authorized Marx Brothers video game! Over the years, there have been official games for Laurel and Hardy, Charlie Chaplin, and The Three Stooges (which has one of my favorite opening sequences ever in a video game), but no games for The Marx Brothers, as far as I can tell. So now Groucho, Harpo, and Chico finally join Mario and Luigi, Billy and Jimmy Lee, and Mega Man and Proto Man (robots can be brothers!!) in their rightful place as video bros. My apologies to Zeppo, who we had to cut from the game for scope. Maybe we’ll release him as DLC for all you Zepp-Heads out there.

There’s a lot more to the story of how Cocoanut Hotel came together for last month’s Gaming Like its 1929 game jam than I’ve written about these past few weeks. I’m going to interview Gwen about her game development journey last month, which was far more significant than mine. Even though the concept for Cocoanut Hotel was initially mine, she put her heart into the project in a way that was truly inspiring.

🎲 Your Turn: If you played Cocoanut Hotel and have a severe allergy to Google Forms, you can still tell me your thoughts. Reply to this email, comment on the Itch page, or on this newsletter by hitting the orange button below.

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Geoffrey Golden is a narrative designer, game creator, and interactive fiction author from Los Angeles. He’s written for Ubisoft, Disney, Gearbox, and indie studios around the world.

2 responses to “🥸 Play the First Marx Bros Video Game”

  1. Brian McGuinness

    This is great. Also…about a year or so ago, I was browsing thru Antstream (it’s a great retro video game cloud service thingy) and there’s actually a weird Groucho game on that for some reason! I think it was just for the ZX Spectrum back in the 80’s, so probably on the UK got it. But yeah…blew my mind haha.

    https://www.antstream.com/game-info/my-name-is-uncle-groucho%2C-you-win-a-fat-cigar/spectrum

    1. Geoffrey Golden

      Wow, I love the bizarre box art! And the game was a contest!
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Name_Is_Uncle_Groucho,_You_Win_a_Fat_Cigar

      I love that in the 70s and 80s, there were games like the Swordquest series that were contests where players could win prizes.

      Well, I’d call this a Groucho game, not a Marx Brothers game, so I’m still saying we published the first one!

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