Tapeworm is the newest effort from Edmund McMillen, the indie game designer, and the artist is best known for The Binding of Isaac and Super Meat Boy. A thirty-day Kickstarter funding campaign for the game has just launched and sold out multiple tiers in minutes.

We doubled our goal in the first 12 min! shit be crazy! this is going to be a wild ride dudes, please keep telling everyone about the kickstarter! the more backers we get the more wacky shit we can add an unlock! https://t.co/TIQQyaBxuC

— Edmund McMillen (@edmundmcmillen) April 28, 2020

In a break from McMillen’s previous games which have mostly been video games, Tapeworm would be a tabletop card game for two to four players if successfully funded. McMillen’s previous work in the tabletop space was a card game adapted from his massively popular Binding of Isaac. In keeping with McMillen’s art style of rendering normally grotesque subjects as adorable caricatures, Tapeworm features four cutesy parasites. Segments of the bodies of these worms form most of the cards used in the game. Players use these cards to create strings of one of the words on each turn. The game seems, from the description on Kickstarter, to be a take on the classic game of Dominos but with a thoroughly modernized rule set.

The goal for the Kickstarter was set at $25,000 and was reached in under five minutes. As of 4 pm Pacific Time today, April 29, the campaign has raised $260,000, more than ten times the goal. With this amount of funding, backers have unlocked all stretch goals for the campaign including an exclusive sticker set and poster. Backer rewards donations ranged from $15 to $200. The rewards themselves vary from base versions of the game to multiple copies of the game as well as bundles of Tapeworm and McMillen’s previous game Binding of Isaac: Four Souls. As usual, top tiers come with signed editions of the game as well as the lower tier’s offerings.

 

McMillen got his start designing flash games in the early 2000s. A collection of these games titled The Basement Collection was released after McMillen found success on Steam with Super Meat Boy. That game’s development was one of the subjects of Indie Game The Movie, a documentary released in 2012. Just before the release of that film in 2011 the first version of The Binding of Isaac was released on PC. The Binding of Isaac has been ported to several other platforms and seen multiple updates and revisions since launch.

Congratulations to Edmund McMillen on a fantastically successful Kickstarter!