The Oatmeal’s Exploding Kittens blows up Kickstarter record
Have you ever wondered what would happen if your cute kitty was confusingly fed a large dose of nitroglycerin and shaken up? Me neither, but it seems this specific mindset mixed with the creative thought process of making a playing cards game is what it took to make it big on the crowd sourcing superstar Kickstarter. That and having a sizable, dedicated following.
Matthew “The Oatmeal” Inman associated himself with Elan Lee and Shane Small to kick start a campaign for a tabletop game about, you guessed it; dangerously volatile young felines. The result is part Inman’s crazy art style, part Cards Against Humanity’s simplicity and part awesome. As stated on their Kickstarter page:
“Exploding Kittens is a highly strategic kitty-powered version of Russian Roulette. Players take turns drawing cards until someone draws an exploding kitten and loses the game. The deck is made up of cards that let you avoid exploding by peeking at cards before you draw, forcing your opponent to draw multiple cards, or shuffling the deck.
The game gets more and more intense with each card you draw because fewer cards left in the deck means a greater chance of drawing the kitten and exploding in a fiery ball of feline hyperbole.”
If that doesn’t sound like one of the best premise in the history of tabletops I don’t know what is.
The important story here is not the project itself, but how fast it acquired its modest funding goal and torpedoed its way as one of the biggest accomplishments since crowd sourcing was made relevant back in 2012 with Double Fine Adventure. Since then a long list of ventures ended with multiple times their initial goal, but none has ever achieved such high numbers in such a short time in the playing cards category, even possibly in all of the service’s history. At the time of this writing the amount pledged towards Exploding Kittens has reached 2.4 million dollars, 240 times its original goal, in less than 36 hours since the creation of the project. The first million milestone was achieved ridiculously quickly at the 7 hours mark. Now that’s what I call a “get rich quick” scheme!
One has to wonder why a silly cards game would attract such incredible interest. If you remember well, Cards Against Humanity also spawned from a similar campaign. Although the results were slightly more humble, it did pick up immense popularity following its release, becoming one of the most enjoyable quick party game of its kind. What’s the difference between those two projects? The growing support for Kickstarter and comparable services has helped but it is truly The Oatmeal’s magical brand power that’s making Exploding Kittens an absurd success so far.
This isn’t Inman’s first rodeo. His first crowd sourcing project was launched in 2012 to protect Nikola Tesla’s laboratory and land in order to turn it into a Museum on the famous(ly unknown) inventor’s history. The end goal was 850k and he was able to raise 1.4 million dollars. He also was able to get Elon Musk to donate an additional million to help with the museum as well as promise a Tesla Supercharger station in the parking lot. We already know Musk is amazing, but imagine how great a human being must be to get someone to donate a freaking million dollars to build a museum!
Matthew Inman is creative, self-employed, his site has more than 5 million hits on a daily basis and his following is huge, 3 128 620 likes on his Facebook page huge. The smell of success forms an aura around him and it is not surprising a game in which he is an active co-creator would pick up as fast as it did.
With 28 more days of possible funding I am excited to see how high the number will get as well as the probability of flabbergasting stretch goals and rewards.
Keep playing, geeks!
