‘People in Japan thought we made footy up’: Pro Jank Footy, the video game taking Australian rules to the world
Game developer David Ashby and Aunty Donna’s Broden Kelly talk about their chaotic and silly sport game – involving meat pies with legs and Ford Falcons on the oval
Try explaining Australian rules football to anyone outside Australia and “it sounds like you’re making it up”, says David Ashby, the multi-hyphenate comedic mind behind deeply silly spoofs such as Italian Spider-Man and Danger 5. “Eighteen players a side, running around on a cricket oval with a rugby ball that has to be bounced every so often and gets kicked between posts – like, what the fuck is happening?”
Two years ago at a fantasy footy barbecue, Ashby had a brainwave: why not make a video game where Australia’s strange national sport becomes even stranger the more you play?
Pro Jank Footy reimagines the sport as a high-octane fever dream, where every time your opponent kicks a goal, you get to change one rule so the game gets increasingly janky (and hilariously stupid). Your opponents turn into seagulls. One player becomes massive. A labrador tries to steal the ball. Everyone loses their arms. The bouncing DVD logo appears and gets in the way (if it hits the corner, you win). Meat pies with legs storm the oval to provide energy boosts. A power-up called “Dad’s Car” sees a Ford Falcon hoon around the grounds. A third team joins in.
Ashby is rattling these off with delight; there are more than 150 in the game. “There’s one called Sore Neck which flips the game upside down so you get a sore neck. There’s another called Where’s the Remote, which switches the channel to HDMI 2,” he says, ticking off his fingers. “It is very dumb stuff.”
We’re sitting in Melbourne’s Great Northern hotel with Ashby’s friend and fellow footy nut, Broden Kelly of Aunty Donna. Right next to us is an old-school arcade cabinet for Pro Jank Footy, which is already attracting informal tournaments among pub-goers. Kelly, who did the commentary for the game, has to speak over the sound of his own voice blaring out of the cabinet. “It’s so sick,” he says. “This will live beyond me.”
Ashby says: “I heard a story about a friend’s housemate who went on a date with some dude and he was like, ‘Oh, do you want to go to the Great Northern? There’s a footy game there’ … I hope they hooked up, because that guy rocks.”
This week, Pro Jank Footy will be released on all the major consoles, worldwide. “Which means, very humorously to me, there is a chance this game is the thing that most people are going to know footy from,” Kelly says, before both men descend into giggles.
Footy is a cultural touchstone in Australia: if you ever need to fill silence with an Australian, you can bring up the weather or ask who they barrack for. “When we showed Pro Jank in Japan, a lot of people were like, ‘Wait – is footy a real sport?’ They thought we made it up,” Ashby says. “Then they saw the meat pies running around and they were like, what the fuck is that?”
“This is their way to learn about Australia’s culture,” adds Kelly. “This is our Ghost of Tsushima.”
Despite all the jokes, this is a point that Ashby and Kelly take very seriously: that Australia must shed its cultural cringe and stop explaining itself to the world, in the same way South Korea and New Zealand have.
“For a long time we were told Australian content does not travel, or you have to explain it to everyone,” Ashby says. “That’s absolutely bullshit, Bluey is the biggest show in the world. We think, ‘Oh, nobody’s interested in footy.’ No, it’s exotic! It’s a fucking strange sport. And an awesome one that should be shared. Don’t be shy about meat pies and red cordial. Americans have no idea what the fuck that is. Who cares! Share it with the world anyway.”
Before Pro Jank, Ashby had never made a video game: he was known for his collaborations with film-maker Dario Russo, particularly the spy comedy Danger 5. But after that inspirational barbecue in 2024, he banged out a last-minute application for Screen Australia’s Emerging Gamemakers Fund, formed his own studio Powerbomb Games and assembled a tiny crack team of programmers, animators and friends in Adelaide to build a demo. When Pro Jank Footy debuted at the South Australian Games Exhibition in 2025, it won best in exhibition and development went into overdrive.
Ashby is determined that anyone can enjoy Pro Jank: “I think it’s always a good idea to make a game that your dad can play so you can absolutely destroy him.” Pro Jank doesn’t feature any gambling references so kids can play it and he eschewed the industry’s reliance on “fucking loot boxes, all that shit – nah, nah, make a good game and make it affordable”.
He also wanted it to be a couch co-op – a game made to be played with friends in the same room, rather than only online as many multiplayer games are these days. “The only couch co-ops are like Moving Out or Overcooked, which are just doing jobs. I don’t want to do that!” Ashby says. “And so many sports games are very serious. When I try to play Pro Evolution or Fifa, it just makes me angry. I feel inept. I’m 39. Show’s over. I can only learn so much now.”
“I do play NBA 2K,” adds Kelly, “and 15-year-olds call me awful things.”
Pro Jank’s aesthetics are inspired by Ashby’s childhood memories of footy in the 1990s, when the AFL went particularly big on club cartoon mascots. He brought in Adelaide-based South Korean artist Hyemin Yoo to design mascots for all his game’s made-up teams – like the Ceduna Doonas, North Problem, the Freecastle Fizzies and the Port Noarlunga Chips. “We wanted that 80s Asian video game, seizure-inducing vibe, like Street Fighter,” Ashby says.
Russo, Ashby’s frequent collaborator, wrote the music and team songs, “which ride the line between complete piss-takes and sincere”. And Kelly recorded the game’s commentary in four hours, which he remembers as “the worst day of my life”.
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“I was taken by a madman into the hills of Adelaide – which has the highest number of serial killers per capita, worth noting for the record,” he says. “Then I genuinely had 1,200 lines to read, which I did over and over. I was screaming for four hours. It was fucking full-on! My ear started bleeding.” His favourite line, which is included in the game, came out as his delirium peaked: “This is all just pixels and one day we will all die!”
Kelly and Ashby are from Adelaide and they passionately vouch for it as a creative hub. “Both the AFL and comedy can be very guilty of saying we have two hubs, Sydney and Melbourne, where everyone creative and cool is – and that’s not true. Because the people who made this game are strange weirdos from Adelaide,” Kelly says. “David and Dario made Danger 5, the best Australian comedy of this century. It’s what Australia does best, like Amyl and the Sniffers and King Gizzard – bold choice makers, weird vibes.”
Ashby loves hearing stories of people’s experiences playing Pro Jank Footy. His favourite came from one of the game’s writers, who showed it to his kids. “They loved it so much that they stopped playing it and went outside to kick the footy and started changing the rules,” he laughs. “That’s just awesome.”
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Pro Jank Footy is out on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch 2, Nintendo Switch and PC on 13 August in Australia and 12 August everywhere else
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