UPDATE: The final amount raised is just short of $8.8 million.
UPDATE: As of Jan. 29 at 10:10 a.m., the game had raised nearly $4.7 million and with 21 days still to go.
Let’s try a phrase out on you and see how you react:
Exploding Kittens.
How does that make you feel? Do you want to pull out your wallet? Have you already pulled out your wallet? Are you walking around with your wallet out, trying to give someone money? Are you pressing money against your computer, hoping the computer will take the money? Do you not care what Exploding kittens is, just that you need whatever it is that is called Exploding Kittens?
That sort of happened on Kickstarter this week, as a card game called Exploding Kittens absolutely, er, erupted.
It began on Tuesday, when three people — Shane Small, Elan Lee, and the guy who draws the Oatmeal, Matt Inman — launched a Kickstarter campaign for a card game called Exploding Kittens. There are a bunch of rules to the game, but mostly there’s this one: You draw an Exploding Kitten card, you lose. They thought it was a good game — it was actually a previous game they made called Bomb Squad before the Oatmeal guy got on board and said, How about we include a bunch of kittens in it and call it Exploding Kittens?
It was a wise decision.
In any case, they set their goal at a modest $10,000. And, $10,000 is a fine, decent number to manufacture a card game about kittens. They launched the Kickstarter campaign, and so it began.
Twenty minutes later, they had their $10,000. Let us explain: Exploding Kittens was 100 percent funded in 20 minutes. Kickstarter gives you 30 days. Then, after one hour, it was 1,000 percent funded. The money, it kept pouring in; there is so much of it in the world, and so much of it found its way to Exploding Kittens. Hundreds of thousands of dollars, on the first day alone, pouring in. Everybody wanted this thing called Exploding Kittens.
Exploding Kittens has now been up for three days. Last night, at 10 p.m. Pacific time (I was watching), it cleared $2,500,000.
This morning it was closing in on $2,700,000.
And only 28 days to go!
But make no mistake: These fellas care about kittens. They are not exploding them willy nilly. They were concerned about the idea of exploding kittens getting out there in the world and people getting the wrong idea about exploding kittens.
“We struggled with this a lot. We love the name Exploding Kittens, but we don’t want to hurt kittens. We also don’t want the kittens to be hurt by anyone else,” they wrote on Kickstarter.
So, they found a solution:
“In the end, we realized that everyone understands feline shenanigans, and that could be our solution. Our kitties would not blow up out of malicious intent or negligence, but by doing the things that kittens do, like running across keyboards or chewing on things they shouldn’t be chewing on.”
“From there, the rest of the cards fell into place, and the cards used to defuse the exploding kittens were items you’d use to defuse regular kittens,” like laser pointers and catnip.
By the time the month is up, Exploding Kittens will probably IPO or buy Yahoo or something. It’s not too late to get on board: The game is only $20. Its makers call it “a card game for people who are into kittens and explosions and laser beams and sometimes goats.” Check out the Kickstarter, Twitter, Facebook, and website.
