‘I LOVE YOU, COLONEL SANDERS’ DATING SIMULATOR GAME
The increasingly-popular genre of video games known as dating simulators puts users into a choose-your-own-adventure style romance plot where the goal is to win the favor of one or more characters of your choosing. In the case of I Love you, Colonel Sanders, the Colonel is the most promising and mysterious student in your class at culinary school. Your goal is to catch his eye and, if you’re lucky, some insight into the culinary opus he’s been tinkering with: his so-called secret recipe.
Writing the plot, designing gigabytes of artwork, and building out the branching narrative structure was an ambitious undertaking. But once it was all said and done, we sat back and watched the internet’s inability to resist the confusing allure of a handsome young, anime Colonel Sanders.
The game contains hours of play time throughout the winding story variations, along with easter eggs and a total of five different endings. It received upwards of 4 billion impressions at launch, thousands of unsolicited streams from avid gamers on Twitch and YouTube, and sustained over 600 active users for the first entire year of being available on the Steam store.
When Seth Meyers makes fun of you on his late night show, and people start showing up to cosplay conventions dressed as characters from your video game, you realize the thing you’ve made might be bigger than a well-disguised commercial.