After 30 days of funding, Exploding Kittens, a simple card game that sought a mere $10,000 on Kickstarter, raised a flabbergasting total of $8,782,571.
Created by comic artist Matthew Inman, as well as Elan Lee and Shane Small, the game likely owes a lot of its popularity to Inman's charisma, who also led a successful crowdfunding campaign to rebuild a Nikola Tesla museum in 2012.
Still, its success is unprecedented. The game raised 87,825% more funds than it sought. With 219,382 backers, it is by far the most backed Kickstarter project ever. It is also the most funded (meaning it raised the most money) project from the Games category, and only two other projects raised more money on the platform: Pebble and Coolest Cooler.
The game consists only of a deck of cards. It's a modern, funny take on Russian roulette, with players drawing cards until someone draws an exploding kitten card, losing the game.
YOU DID IT. pic.twitter.com/9a1QOmOwqy— Exploding Kittens (@gameofkittens) February 20, 2015
Right before the end of the campaign, the three creators of the game started an AMA (ask me anything) session on Reddit, explaining some of the secrets behind the game's success as well as sharing their future plans.
One of the learnings from the conversation is the fact that the $8.7 million raised does not automatically make the game's creators millionaires -- it only means they sold a lot of games.
"We don’t have a retail plan yet. We made a promise to more than 200,000 people to ship them this game. That’s our highest priority right now," Elan Lee wrote in a comment.
It's a tall order for a company that's existed for little more than 30 days. The founders claim they are doing "everything possible" to stay on schedule and ship all the game packs out in July 2015.
And as for the amount of money the trio expected to gather, Lee reveals one of their early estimates was to sell a mere 500 decks. "Did you have any idea that this was going to be this big?" asked one commenter on Reddit. Lee's reply was simple: "NOPE."