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He made a viral horror game in 2 months – it sold 6 million copies, and now he can make whatever he wants for the rest of his life: "My final theory is that gambling is very fun"
He made a viral horror game in 2 months – it sold 6 million copies, and now he can make whatever he wants for the rest of his life: "My final theory is that gambling is very fun"

Yahoo

time4 days ago

  • Entertainment
  • Yahoo

He made a viral horror game in 2 months – it sold 6 million copies, and now he can make whatever he wants for the rest of his life: "My final theory is that gambling is very fun"

When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. There's a clear before and after moment in the career of (mostly) solo game dev Mike Klubnika. He's been making short, grungy games for years, but it wasn't until the 2024 release of Buckshot Roulette, a Russian roulette-style gambling sim where you let a shotgun decide your fate in a wager with a monstrous underground casino dealer, that he saw massive commercial success. And it was massive. With a game made in two months, first launched on and then on Steam, and later expanded with a hotly demanded multiplayer update, Klubnika sold over 6 million copies, putting him in the coveted position of essentially never again needing to worry about what he creates or how it performs. On top of that, Buckshot Roulette has put millions of eyes on his next game, Split (or s.p.l.i.t), a short psychological horror game where you navigate hacker terminals, which is out on Steam today, July 24. Klubnika tells me this success hasn't changed his life all that "dramatically" apart from the obvious thing: "I can do game development full-time and not really worry that much about the commercial side of games. I feel like I can come up with an idea for a game and I can make it in a more peaceful way, knowing that if it doesn't sell well, or if it doesn't reach enough players, then it's not as big of a deal as it could be. So in a way, it's quite freeing. But it's also not really that different to what it was before, because I was never really worried about, oh, what if I put this game out and it doesn't sell enough copies? I wasn't even selling games that much. It was like, what if it doesn't get any downloads? I'm very grateful for it." The Buckshot Roulette launch was "pretty crazy," he recalls. "I remember I was at a friend's place, we had a movie night, and I had just released Buckshot like a week ago. We were looking at Twitch on the big screen. We're looking at people playing the game, and there were so many people streaming, and there were so many viewers. You could also see that the chat in the streams was going crazy, because everyone was like, oh no, that one's a blank, shoot yourself instead of shooting the dealer. It was just chaos. It was very insane. I was not expecting it at all." I asked Klubnika how he might explain Buckshot Roulette's meteoric launch. "I've been thinking about it for quite a bit," he begins. "I think, generally, obviously, it's just luck. Right game, right time." It's simple to pick up and play, he reasons, and it's fun to watch over a friend's shoulder or, indeed, on Twitch. He reckons the indie horror scene, the perfect home for the "dirty, grungy, sort of hostile" games and worlds he creates, was pretty quiet at the time, leaving the door open for a hit to dominate conversations. He tips his hat to Inscryption, a superb card game roguelike and a big inspiration for Buckshot Roulette, for its style of presentation, which people have clearly latched onto. "My final theory is that gambling is very fun," he adds. I think he might be onto something. With Split, Klubnika doesn't want or need a repeat of Buckshout Roulette. The joy of making short games, he says, and working on games like these two as a solo dev – though overall, he "wouldn't necessarily call myself a solo dev" between minor collaborations or outsourcing – is acting on ideas quickly and getting them out into the wild fast. He's "thought about" making a bigger game, but something like Split is perfect right now. Split is a bit more video game-y than most of Klubnika's games, he says, and has more narrative to it as well. You can beat it in under two hours, he reckons. It's $2.99 on Steam, like Buckshot before it, or $2.54 with the launch discount. This is just how he likes to create – the inverse of the enormous games that dominate the industry through update after update after time-devouring update. (The reason Split took a bit longer to make is Klubnika couldn't help himself from embellishing a separate game jam project called Fused 240, co-developed with Wriks). Increasingly, short games are punching far above their weight, and Klubnika, like me, hopes that trend continues. "Especially recently, I've kind of noticed that [trend] with Balatro and Peak," he says. "It's pretty crazy. I feel like, in terms of industry, it might have more of a focus. Shorter timelines. But I'm not really sure." Separately, he adds: "When we're talking about dev timelines of four months to five months, it just keeps it fresh. I'm already really looking forward to next projects, and it's always very interesting finishing something and starting from scratch all over again. You get to just explore new ideas, rather than just making the same type of content for the same project. So I just find it very refreshing and also very, I guess, scopable as a solo dev." "My savings had run out": In a few months, a Sonic 3 animator made an N64-style game based on an iconic Animal Crossing mechanic and chucked it onto Steam because "I needed to pay rent," and it worked

‘Donkey Kong Bananza' Should Be the Reason You Buy the Switch 2
‘Donkey Kong Bananza' Should Be the Reason You Buy the Switch 2

Gizmodo

time4 days ago

  • Entertainment
  • Gizmodo

‘Donkey Kong Bananza' Should Be the Reason You Buy the Switch 2

I can feel my heart lift as I play Donkey Kong Bananza. Every punch from DK's ham-hock-sized fists sends a shower of stones and debris into the air. Enemies tear apart until they're left as golden skeletons, begging me to shoulder them into the nearest rock face just to watch the scenery dissolve into a rainbow of rock, mud, and golden nuggets. Every chunk ripped from the ground offers more gameplay possibilities, but I'm barely thinking. I'm just going. I know that I'm playing the game the right way because I keep letting loose, and I keep finding secrets and hidey-holes for the game's multitude of collectibles. This is catharsis. This is joy. If all future Nintendo Switch 2 games receive this much time and attention—with such a focus on playing to the dockable handheld's strengths—then we could be looking at one of the best consoles of all time. Donkey Kong Bananza Donkey Kong Bananza one of those games that you end up buying an entire console for, and not regretting it one bit. Pros Cons Donkey Kong Bananza makes you feel as powerful and reckless as a massive, silly ape with bananas on the brain. This world is meant to be breakable. The denizens of the game's 17 main underground layers are happy for you to smash through their homes, break their furniture, or even break them (don't worry, those lovable, bright-eyed 'Fractones' grow back). It would be a mindless escape if it weren't for young Pauline riding on your back. She offers encouragement and direction. In the game's rare quiet moments, Pauline shares her fears with her mum ape companion. She's afraid of many things, like most kids are—spiders, poison, and heights. But she finds comfort in the fact that DK's there. It's like you're leading a child hand-in-hand through a beautiful adventure. She feels safe with you, and as the player, I wanted to make sure I deserved that trust. To say Donkey Kong Bananza hooked me is an understatement. Still, I know its flaws well. The camera sometimes cannot keep up with players going underground or into DK-shaped holes in walls. There are rare points in the game where the number of objects flying across the screen is too much for the Switch 2 to handle, which leads to frame drops. DK climbs with such speed he can be difficult to control, especially when you try to swap from one plane onto another. Many deaths felt earned; I was going full ape and spilled myself off a cliff. Other deaths left me sighing in exasperation as I watched my gold counter go down. I was never left bereft of gold, but as an obsessive completionist, I hurt to leave a single nugget uncollected. If there's one big complaint I have, it's that Nintendo didn't take advantage of all the new control options available. The only instance of the Joy-Con 2 mouse controls is in two-player mode. A second controller controls Pauline, who can aim around the screen and shoot out words like a back-mounted monkey turret. It's not a difficult game. Out of all the bosses in all the kilometers deep underground, whether they're giant monsters or one of the three main nemeses—three kongs of The Void Company headed up by the maniacal Void Kong—I died only a few times, and normally because I had already turned my brain off while reveling in the latest crater I put into the ground. Exploring requires only an ounce more brainpower as you hunt for various Banandium gems to improve Donkey Kong's capabilities or fossils to fuel your ever-present need to dress DK and Pauline in swankier garb. A week after launch is time enough to think about the place Donkey Kong has in Nintendo's lexicon. Games like Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Super Mario Odyssey on the original Switch set the tone for what players could expect. Both were incredible games that felt all the better because they could make use of what made the console unique. The OG Switch was a low-power device, and despite that, we would not find another mass-market game that offered the same sense of exploration as BoTW until Elden Ring. Sony took more than seven years to find a studio that could make a game as imaginative as Odyssey in the form of the delightful Astro Bot. Now Nintendo has a whole new console that's much more powerful than before. No, it's not as strong as an Xbox Series X or PlayStation 5. It doesn't need to be, when the developers inside Nintendo's various teams are this good at crafting games built with the hardware in mind. In a Q&A posted by Nintendo, Bananza's developers (many of whom worked on Odyssey) said the game originated as an original Switch title—similar to how Mario Kart World began its development. The team settled on using voxel technology to build out the game world's destructible terrain. Imagine if a pixel could exist on a three-dimensional grid, and you'll get close to what this looks like in programming terms. It's the same technology used in games like Deep Rock Galactic to help your space dwarves dig through mountains of rock. In Bananza, even the enemies are made of voxels. While some levels in Odyssey used voxel technology, it was in limited quantities and on certain levels. The Switch 2 has more RAM available—12GB compared to 4GB on the OG handheld. Of the Switch 2 RAM, 3GB of the total is dedicated to running the system's base software. With only 9GB of RAM available and improved CPU capabilities, Nintendo's devs crafted a wholly destructible world where there can be a cavalcade of distinct physics objects moving on screen and still maintain a stable 60 fps frame rate, at least most of the time. Nintendo's strongest asset has been crafting games to fit the hardware. Bananza is what happens when you give the dev teams more resources to push what's possible. You can't put Donkey Kong in a basket (he'd probably just punch his way out and leave a 5-foot hole in your wall in the process). It's a collect-a-thon that shares so much of the same DNA as Super Mario Odyssey. It's a cathartic action game. It's a game about discovery, exploration, and player expression. But at its heart, it's a physics-based puzzle-action title. You didn't get many of those on the original Switch, especially toward the end of its lifespan. That makes sense, as the system simply didn't have the memory nor CPU power necessary to handle a multitude of physics simulations for dozens of objects at once. The game is chock-full of optional battle arenas and puzzle environments. Most of them rely on a specific mechanic introduced for each level, but they sometimes feel like Nintendo is flexing its muscles for where it can push the Switch 2. One memorable level in the Freezer Layer asks players to smack a path through snow to let dozens of small ice crystals fill a bucket—like a large pachinko snow cone machine. That's not to say the Switch 2 is somehow a secret console powerhouse. We know what's going on inside, but it makes what Donkey Kong Bananza is able to achieve that much more impressive. The world of Bananza's underground environs is painterly, almost pastel in both the look and colors of each underground map. The hairy ape that's always at the center of the screen is more detailed than the rest of the environment. All media is an illusion to some degree, but Nintendo hides the fault lines better than most companies, especially when it has more room to push game detail. What will be interesting to see with the rest of Nintendo's first-year Switch 2 titles will be if it can keep up this pedigree. Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa told investors earlier this month that longer development cycles are 'unavoidable,' especially if players keep expecting more from their games. Video game industry analyst Joost van Dreunen reported that Nintendo's full-time employee count has ballooned to 8,205 in 2025, at least based on company financials. Nintendo will need to keep up the pace to meet player expectations. If future titles are as good and innovative as Donkey Kong Bananza, we won't have much to worry about.

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