Mewgenics, the biggest video game hit of early 2026, wasn't created by a behemoth studio like Nintendo or Electronics Arts.
It was crafted by two Santa Cruz area residents, Edmund McMillen and Tyler Glaiel, who worked for six years on the cartoonish, sometimes grotesque strategy game about breeding mutant cats.
The game was released on video game store Steam on Tuesday and sold 500,000 copies in 36 hours, generating US$13.5mil (RM52.6mil) in revenue. The game also has the highest review score of 2026 so far and is being floated as a "Game of the Year" award contender.
It was the biggest launch of McMillan's 25-year career, which includes influential titles like the challenging platformer Super Meat Boy and biblically themed action game The Binding of Isaac.
It's the latest example of a small team of independent game developers scoring a hit amid an industry – much of it based in California – in turmoil over widespread layoffs, cancellations and disruption from artificial intelligence.
McMillen, who lives in Watsonville, was startled by the massive popularity of Mewgenics, which doesn't shy away from the unseemly parts of having a pet: poop, blood and death, rendered in his signature hand-drawn art style. Cats can get disorders and diseases like ADHD, cancer and even COVID.
"It's really surprising. I expected people to be like 'It's ugly. It's not funny,'" he said.
And there's the name, a satirical reference to the racist pseudoscience known as eugenics that led to forced sterilisations in California as recently as 2010.
Pushing boundaries isn't new for McMillen, who started by making games released on the early Internet culture touchstone Newgrounds with themes around depression and childhood trauma.
He credits growing up in Santa Cruz for exposing him to the 1987 vampire film "The Lost Boys," which was filmed locally, and artist Jim Phillips, who created the skateboard icon "Screaming Hand." Those influences helped push him to pursue art and design.
Mewgenics was originally announced in 2012, cancelled for years and resurrected in 2018. Six "long but easy" years of development followed, with McMillen focusing on drawing and world-building and Glaiel coding an ever-expanding list of characters, mechanics and enemies. The duo also hired a handful of additional artists, engineers and musicians, making it the biggest team that they've worked with on a game.
"The game is massive and so combo heavy that it's nearly impossible to check and account for every possible thing that can happen," said Glaiel, who created a program to play the game at super speeds to catch glitches, leading to a smooth launch.
The game pulls from a variety of inspirations, including the turn-based, grid combat of Final Fantasy Tactics and Dungeons & Dragons, creature collecting of Pokemon and furniture hoarding of Animal Crossing.
Players send out cats on adventures across an array of environments with randomised enemies and a vast selection of 1,200 abilities and 900 items. McMillen expects the average player to spend 250 hours to beat the game, with deeper secrets that will take even longer to find. Future expansions are also planned.
"The game is designed for it to be constantly crazy," McMillen said.
There were signs that the game was attracting a cult following even prior to release. One fan drew art inspired by the game for 1,757 days in a row. McMillen amassed around 300,000 followers on both TikTok and X as he posted development for the last few years.
McMillen's previous games have sold millions of copies, so he had the financial independence to work on Mewgenics for as long as he wanted. The game was delayed from releasing last fall for additional months of polish. That became a blessing as it benefitted from a relatively light video game release schedule in February, and journalists and livestreamers hungry for the next big game.
"This is the deadest time of the year. The stars really aligned," McMillen said.
He and Glaiel did not have a publisher for the game, instead taking on marketing, language translations and other business tasks themselves.
In the past two weeks, they livestreamed on YouTube every day, showing off hours of gameplay and holding fan contests to help promote the game. Hundreds of fans participated, and winners were awarded with game codes and other merchandise.
Despite a renaissance in independent game development, McMillen and Glaiel's success is a major outlier. Dozens of games are released on Steam each day, with the vast majority fading into obscurity.
"The starving artist thing is a reality," McMillan said.
But recent hits show there's an appetite for games that are daring, weird and surprising, he said, advising aspiring creators to "stick to your guns, be true to yourself and honest to your work."
"I was making [expletive] Flash games for 10 years before I had any money," McMillen said. "I loved the whole time."
For Glaiel, the game's success will enable him to afford a house after stressing out about the increasingly expensive housing market over the past decade.
Santa Cruz "is such a unique place geographically and culturally, so I'm pretty glad that it's looking like I can stay here forever now," he said. – San Francisco Chronicle/Tribune News Service
