Back in January, Zoe Quinn, the developer of Depression Quest whose life was turned into a living hell when she became the first target of the harassment campaign known as Gamergate, found the creative partner for her next game by sending a single tweet. Seemingly on a whim, she messaged Chuck Tingle, the mysterious and prolific author of such esoteric erotic tales as Pounded In The Butt By My Own Butt and Slammed In The Butthole By My Concept Of Linear Time, and asked if he’d like to make a game with her. Tingle responded as enthusiastically as a person whose utterances are limited to a permanent Twitter gimmick can and fed Quinn a series of notes and doodles. A few months later, that game actually went into production, and now, its developers have brought it to Kickstarter.
Quinn and company are seeking $69,420 (get it?) to help cover the cost of the game, which they’re calling Project Tingler for now. They plan to distribute it under a “pay what you can” model, so that anyone will be able to take in its story of “positive sexuality, self-acceptance, love, and personal growth” for free. For backing the campaign, you’ll get to play the finished product before it’s released to the public, and higher reward tiers include the usual array of T-shirts, signed props, and the chance to appear in the game as a Unicorn Butt Cop. If you give $10,069 (get it?) Tingle will name a protagonist in an upcoming book after you.
To really capture the look of the “Tingleverse”—half-naked men standing around Photoshopped stock photos of businessmen with dinosaur/gorilla/yeti heads—Quinn’s game will hearken back to the full-motion video (FMV) creations of the ’90s, where players “interacted” with recorded footage of live actors. In this case, they’ll be talking to, and seducing, a bunch of men in animal masks while tracking down their missing son. Despite all the talk of butt-pounding, there won’t actually be any hardcore pornography in the game. Instead, sex scenes will be entirely of the literotica variety and “read aloud” by the game’s cast. If that’s not clean enough for you, it will also include a mode “where sexual situations will be replaced by footage of kittens playing.” Kittens are nice, but at that point, why even bother playing a game inspired by the author of Slammed In The Butt By The Living Leftover Chocolate Chip Cookies From My Kitchen Cabinet?