The Most Normal Golf Game Ever Made

You would be right to assume a game called Normal Golf Game is, in fact, not normal. It is, instead, one of the most inspired sports games since Nintendo’s Wii Sports. Normal Golf Game is simultaneously an absurdist take on an elitist sport where you spend hours whacking a tiny ball with a big stick and the best translation of why there’s no more transcendent feeling than nailing an approach shot with an iron, as you watch that lil’ ball roll towards its circular home. 

A game where you will, within moments of one another, curse with frustration, scream in glorious triumph, and fall over laughing. Like Super Mega Baseball, its arcade-y nature and cheeky attitude give cover to a video game that understands the sport it's portraying better than most hardcore simulations. 

Normal Golf Game is both easy to describe (you play golf!) and hard to describe (you swing in real-time by moving the mouse, adjust the angle of the club with the keyboard also in real-time, and there’s a meta narrative Ala The Stanley Parable). It’s a game that makes the most sense when you’re playing it and realize “oh, I understand what it’s doing” and then go “oh, fuck.”

I will do my best by simply trying to explain how you swing in this game. In a typical golf game, you might pick a club, tap a button a few times to fill a meter to determine power and accuracy, and you’re off to the races. In Normal Golf Game, you start by picking a club (driver, hybrid, iron, wedge, putter). Then, you adjust the wobbly angle of the club with several keys. You’re now ready to swing, but swinging is controlled by the mouse. Imagine the mouse is drawing a line outward from your character. You need to “draw” that line, aka the swing angle, all the way to its connection with the ball. The whole angle. Nothing locks into place, either. The longer the line, the more power you bring…but a much bigger chance to screw it up, too. The angle of the club is fluctuating, requiring fidgeting and adjusting, while you are prepping for a swing. It is very much like rubbing your stomach and head at the same time.

(You can, for the record, play the game just fine on a controller and swap the mouse for analog sticks and the keyboard for bumper buttons. Having tried both, it’s my preferred method of play!)

Fully explaining Normal Golf Game is hard even for its designer, Luke Muscat.

“It is something I have struggled with the entire time through production,” said Muscat recently, "to the point that had to fully rebrand the game just to try and help with what the elevator pitch.”

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Early on, the game was called Luke Muscat’s Ultimate Golf Challenge. Nobody was paying attention, even though Muscat is the designer behind some of the biggest mainstream hits in the past 20 years: Fruit Ninja and Jetpack Joyride. His weird golf game wasn’t getting any eyeballs.

Where Muscat tries to nab eyeballs is on YouTube. Since leaving Halfbrick, the studio where he helped build those mobile hits, he’s documented his indie development journey on YouTube. 

“One of the big purposes of having the YouTube channel for me is validating ideas,” said Muscat. “Putting out ‘this is what I'm working on' and seeing if anyone cares. As a completely solo indie developer, it's good for me to get that feedback on like, ‘Is this interesting?’”

Muscat’s last game, a Lovecraft-inspired roguelike called Feed the Deep where you play a diver exploring caves, was a relative flop. Or, in Muscat’s words, “nobody cared.” (The game has 460 “very positive” reviews on Steam that most indies might kill for, but relative to Fruit Ninja, that’s nobody.)

Instead, Muscat found himself drawn to his other hobby: YouTube. What if he started thinking about what makes a good YouTube video. Would that translate to people caring about a game?

That is where one of Normal Golf Game’s most inspired aesthetic choices, its full-motion video golfers, came from. It is not an homage to the legendary Links games from Access Software in the 90s that also had full-motion video golfers. Nor is it riffing on the popular Golden Tee series.

“I had this idea that FMV graphics would be good because it would solve a couple of problems,” said Muscat, who is more designer than artist. “It would be a way for me to avoid having to draw something—it would lean away from my weakness. Also, I was like ‘Oh, imagine how good the video will be where you're like you know you're setting up like a green screen.”

He was right, by the way. It did make for a very good video.

It’s the tiny touches that really make it sing, though, like the way Muscat doesn’t entirely eliminate the green screen from the footage he shot. Instead, the green screen bleeds through on the edges with an uncanny surrealism that matches the game’s reality-teetering approach.

But Normal Golf Game would be excellent without or without FMV. What makes it distinct, what makes it unique, is the novelty of its interface and the way it captures the feeling of a golf swing.

“If there's one thing that I care about a lot and has been a through line through my whole career, it's novel input mechanics,” he said. “Fruit Ninja was definitely that at the time. It was a very novel input mechanic and it was very…what’s the word for it? It's a very expressive way of playing a game.”