Many Buttholes Were Made for the Egg Game in ‘I Think You Should Leave’

The most enchanting, delightful, and funny skit in the third season of I Think You Should Leave is the one in which a nude video game egg pulls down its shell and flashes its full butthole at the camera. The flashed hole is a reward won by the skit’s character for playing a game where he feeds eggs to the egg. It’s captivating, and not just because of the cartoon nudity.

The game and the egg are both the work of cartoonist and game designer Alec Robbins. Robbins is probably best remembered as the guy who draws the comic about Mr. Boop, a man married to Betty Boop. “i want people to know i worked extremely hard on the butthole,” he said on Twitter. “i worked hard to make it perfect. i tried many different types of buttholes and found what i decided was best for the world. same for the bush.”

i made the egg game in the new season of ITYSL. drew all the egg stuff and made it a fully-playable fake game for some reason. i hope you like the egg game sketch. go watch it through the window of someone who's still paying for netflix pic.twitter.com/epvfiaIaBA

— aLec robBins (@alecrobbins) May 30, 2023

I reached out to Robbins to see if he would show me some of the test buttholes and bushes, but he declined. “I don’t think I can share all of the concepting but just know there were a lot of bushes and buttholes,” he told me via email. “Just imagine a whole bunch of bushes and buttholes in your mind’s eye and you’ll get the idea.”

Robbins coded the game in a video game engine called Construct 2. “It’s fully playable but only in the sense that it works and does exactly what it needed to do for production,” he said. “It would take some extra work to get it playable in a way that makes sense for the public. Also the game doesn’t make sense. So it would be awful to play. But I can’t convince anyone of that, they keep bugging me about it!”

“The game is kind of just nonsense,” Robbins said. “Obviously the main goal is to pick up eggs and drag them into the big egg’s mouth. That’s the only rule that makes any sense.”

According to Robbins, it’s unusual to make a playable version of a fictional game for an skit like this, but that the goal was to have something for Tim Robinson to interact with during his performance. “Was that a good idea? Maybe!” he said. “It might have been easier to just go the animation route! But personally I loooove the idea of going the extra mile and making an entire fake game. I think it adds a lot of realism—I’m sure I made a lot of choices in the design that an animator wouldn’t have made, and those choices might have helped sell it better as a believable game. The post-production team added a bunch of smart touches like the red-glitch effect when the game has an error.”

Animating the games took a little bit longer than coding it and Robbins traded a lot of visuals back and forth with creators Robinson and Zach Kanin before settling on something. “I sent Tim and Zach a bunch of different pitches for how it could look, ranging from early-2000s browser Flash games to predatory microtransaction-riddled mobile games,” Robbins said. “Ultimately they really wanted this vintage black-and-white Mac game look, and it was absolutely the right choice. Also the easiest choice to draw art for, so that was nice!”

Kanin is also a cartoonist whose work has appeared in New Yorker, and Robbins found him an easy person to collaborate with. Especially when it came to buttholes. “I had been trying out different things for the butthole, like the classic cartoon ‘X’ mark or a simple circle, but Zach had drawn—maybe unintentionally—this perfectly-detailed tiny circular butthole with a little crescent fold inside it, implying some real depth,” Robbins said. “That’s not a standard cartoon butthole. That’s special. I took that sketch and ran with it. I wouldn’t have thought of it on my own, I think, and in the final product it probably amounts to no more than 5 pixels of black. But those 5 pixels go a loooooong way and the butthole feels unforgettable to me now. The bush, by the way, was all me. I tried every pixel-brush I could find to get the right look but I knew exactly when I had it. I take full credit for the bush.”

There’s already a bootleg version of the game up online at egggame.org. Robbins said it was made by a fan.