Exploding Kittens breaks Kickstarter backers record
With a remarkable 107,622 backers and counting, plus three weeks still left to run on its crowd-funding campaign, the offbeat card game is also well on its way to becoming one of the most successful products in Kickstarter history in terms of money pledged, too.
At the moment, the most successful Kickstarter campaign in history is the Coolest Cooler, which raised a staggering $13.28 million last August, attracting 62,642 backers in the process.
Meanwhile the most backed campaign in history was, until Wednesday at least, the Reading Rainbow re-launch project that attracted 105,857 supporters and $5.4 million in pledges, putting it in sixth place in terms of funds raised.
And already in seventh place on the all-time funds-raised list with $4,240,220 -- that's over 42000% of its initial target of just $10,000 -- is a card game for two-to-four players, illustrated by comic artist Matthew Inman and co-created by Inman along with Elan Lee and Shane Small, who both worked on the Xbox.
Described as a cat-based take on Russian Roulette -- drawing an exploding kitten card from the deck means the player is dead and the game is lost -- it took just 20 minutes to hit its $10,000 funding target and an hour to raise ten times that amount.
Writing on its campaign blog on Wednesday, the Exploding Kittens team announced hitting the milestone and also declared that setting the record had everything to do with the Kickstarter community and nothing to do with money or press attention.
Be that as it may, now that it has set a new record and because a deck of Exploding Kittens cards can be snapped up with just a $20 pledge, it's a pretty safe bet that the game and the campaign are about to go viral.
And if it carries on clocking up new backers over the next 22 days at the same rate that it has over the past week, there's a good chance that Exploding Kittens could raise the $9 million needed to become the biggest campaign in terms of support and funds raised in Kickstarter history.
