Can he do it again? The creator of Steam sensation Bongo Cat, Marcel Zurawka, is taking a new idle typing game to Gamescom as he searches for a publisher for it. He won’t tell me what it is yet when we talk on Discord, because he only has a small build to show publishers, he says, and is a month or two from revealing more. But if Zurawka can leverage even a fraction of Bongo Cat’s audience to play the new game, it could be huge.
If you don’t know, Bongo Cat has consistently been one of the most played Games on Steam since it launched earlier this year, regularly claiming as many as 150,000 concurrent players. I spoke to Zurakwa about Bongo Cat’s extraordinary story earlier this summer, and suggested then that astronomical though those numbers were, the game might not have had its biggest moment. A mysterious update was on the way that had the power to transform the game, I said, but I couldn’t tell you anything about it. Now I can. You can even play it for yourself, because Meowtiplayer, as it’s adorably called, arrived this week.
It’s simple but incredibly effective. Multiplayer allows you to add friends’ Bongo Cats to your screen and watch as they paw-bop to each keystroke or button press that your friends make. I tested it with Zurawka, and even with only one extra Bongo Cat on the screen, it was oddly hypnotic and spontaneously hilarious. But there’s scope to go much bigger. The game officially supports a massive 100 people Bongo Catting together (let’s make a verb out of it). Unofficially, Zurawka tells me, it can go as high as 250, which is, frankly, ludicrous. There’s not enough space on the screen.