Game Gets Gay Marriage, Because Kickstarter

Double Fine’s strategy game Massive Chalice will let you get married, and make babies. But wait a minute. What if two dudes/ladies want to get married?

Well, the game didn’t originally support it.

“That was something I got kinda blindsided by”, Double Fine’s Brad Muir tells Rock Paper Shotgun. “That was really unfortunate. It kinda makes me feel shitty that it’s not something I’d thought of. I think it’s sort of hetero privilege that I didn’t see it coming.”

Here’s where it gets interesting: gay marriage is now in the game, and it’s because of Kickstarter.

“We brought it [via Kickstarter] to a broader group of people, and then there were some people who brought it up and wanted to talk about it. There’s a raging thread on our forums.”

If they’d taken the game straight to a publisher, the old-fashioned way, that would never have happened. So, say what you will about Kickstarter’s merits as a finding method, it’s certainly useful for the most important kind of focus-testing imaginable: with the people already promising to buy your game.

How Kickstarter Got Gay Marriage Into Massive Chalice [Rock, Paper, Shotgun]