The title "Untitled Goose Game" was first used after submitting the game to Fantastic Arcade, a game festival in Austin, Texas, due to the team's indecisiveness with choosing a name. The game was internally referred to as "Goose Game" before then, although that was deemed unusable for the final release. However, the placeholder title they chose stuck due to positive public reactions, technically (and ironically) leaving the game without a title.

Shortly after the game's release, some of the game's fans began speculating on the political leanings of the human characters, who the goose antagonizes. As many of the game's fans were left-of-center, the most common theory posited that the humans were all conservatives who voted in favor of the United Kingdom's departure from the European Union. After a Twitter user sent a tweet to the game's developer House House asking if this was the case, they denied the theory, instead stating that the game took place in an alternate timeline where Britain underwent a Marxist revolution after conservative and Euroskeptic prime minister Margaret Thatcher was chased out of office by a goose, causing the Conservative Party's "irreparable decline".

In a 2019 interview with Vulture, developers Jacob Strasser and Michael McMaster stated that this story was "a joke canonical version of the world of the game," noting that many fans responded to the explanation by expressing sympathy with the human cast. The pair additionally described the goose as "chaotic neutral" (an alignment from the Dungeons & Dragons franchise) and expressed flattered amusement with fans' political interpretations of the title, stating that "Anything the left can take joy in and pride in and have a bit of fun with, we love. And if it pisses off some alt-right people, then great."

According to the developers at House House, the game was not originally intended to feature reactive music. It was added to the game based on the online reaction to the game's 2017 trailer:

In 2021, the game's developer and publisher collaborated with the animation company Chromosphere Studio to create a 4-minute pitch pilot for a potential animated series based on the game called "Untitled Goose Programme". The show would have been presented as recorded TV feed flipping to different channels where the Goose bothers the host and/or villagers. It's not known which networks or streaming services it was pitched to, but due to a lack of interest, further plans for the show were shelved. The pitch pilot was later officially uploaded to YouTube in 2024.