The Bear Season 3 dropped last week, so someone decided to turn it into a video game… sort of.
Created by Michael Kandel and Joe Miciak under their Hotel Art Thief banner, the animated video, which you can view below, encapsulates plenty that viewers have loved about The Bear so far — while also turning it into something you might see in a nightmare. While the FX/Hulu show sees chefs like Carmy and Syndey rallying to cook and serve some of Chicago’s tastiest dishes, The Bear "video game" features blurry floating heads, stellar voice acting, smoking and feeding mini-games, and a section where you run away from your hungry mom.
“Dinner for mother,” Jamie Lee Curtis’ disembodied head says as she moves closer to the camera.
It’s… a lot, but if you’re a fan of The Bear, then just about every second of the The Bear The Game video has something to laugh at. There’s even a cover of Radiohead’s Let Down that plays while you fend off Chicago dogs in your restaurant. You can see what it’s like to feed Richie on “No Rush” difficulty mode in the video below.
the bear video game actually looks pretty cool pic.twitter.com/pijrftMFDr
— Michael Kandel (@K_A_N_D_E_L) June 28, 2024
Speaking with IGN, Miciak says the idea for The Bear The Game didn't originally spawn from the Jeremy Allen White-led dramedy. He says he simply "loved the idea of a super stressful video game where you’re running a restaurant like Cooking Mama, or Overcooked, but you’re actually allowed to just take it easy." It was Kandel's idea to tie in The Bear with the "eerily soothing" style they've used in past projects like their user:brian(box) sketch.
"We’re both big fans of the show, and it’s so popular online we figured it would be perfect to try to get it done in time for Season 3," Miciak says. "There’s something about the show that feels like if it were released in the 2000s, there would be a PS2 game for it."
The Hotel Art Thief duo says it took a weekend to edit the first draft, a few days to make those floating heads, and just less than three weeks to record, animate in Blender, and bring everything together for the final package you see before you. It was tireless work to put this fever-dream-like spin on The Bear into a video, so don't expect to actually saute onions and smoke with Syndey in a playable version of a The Bear video game anytime soon.
"Mike and I do want to try to figure out how to add video game storytelling to our live sketches we do as Hotel Art Thief, with audiences participating in a choose-your-own-adventure type group game," Miciak said. "So maybe it will continue to live in on in spirt on stage at some point."
user:Brian(box) pic.twitter.com/M6qP9BLbZu
— Michael Kandel (@K_A_N_D_E_L) August 4, 2023
Miciak and Kandel aren't ruling out a sequel to their The Bear sketch, but they'd like to at least watch Season 3 before even attempting to make a follow-up.
"But we usually like to always keep people guessing. I’m sure we’ll at least do a spiritual sequel," Miciak added. "Mike and I are always talking about people we’d like to see as 3D floating heads in our cinematic universe."
The Bear The Game is, unfortunately, not playable. On the bright side, The Bear Season 3 is now available in full on Hulu. We gave the stressful cooking series’ latest batch of episodes a 7/10 in our review. We said, “The Bear still swings for the fences when it comes to innovative storytelling, but Carmy going deeply interior this season throws the show’s balance and forward momentum out of whack.”
Michael Cripe is a freelance contributor with IGN. He started writing in the industry in 2017 and is best known for his work at outlets such as The Pitch, The Escapist, OnlySP, and Gameranx.
Be sure to give him a follow on Twitter @MikeCripe.
