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The man in the mask wants you to click the tally counter. So begins Strange Scaffold’s short, yet highly distressing new game, Clickolding—a very literal take on clicker games—released on Steam this week.
The lore of how video games pitches are conceived is not always exciting. It’s often an obfuscated process that involves pitch decks, investor hunts, and a lot of jumping through approval hoops.
Clickolding was not one such case. The game, the title of which is a play on words that combines the kink of cuckolding—where a person gets an erotic charge from watching their partner have sex with another person—and the clicking of a clicker, was made up entirely on the spot at 2024’s Game Developers Conference. What started as a joke quickly spiraled into Strange Scaffold’s outlandish release that’s now being hailed as “disturbed,” “one of the most unusual” games critics have played, and the “creepiest thing you can buy on Steam right now.”
This is the story of Clickolding’s creation, as told by those who were there.
During the final night of GDC, a bunch of developers from companies like Strange Scaffold, Innersloth, and Aggro Crab gathered in a hotel lobby to hang out and unwind from a long week. There, they found themselves enthralled with an ordinary device the Aggro Crab team had picked up a few days prior.
Gary Porter, Innersloth Unity programmer: [Each year] they go to a thrift shop and they just buy some weird toy or fidgety thing. It’s a conversation starter. This year it was a clicker.
Xalavier Nelson Jr., Strange Scaffold studio head: We got increasingly obsessed with [this] tally counter and realized just how neurodivergent this group was in the process.
Storm Hughes, Aggro Crab programmer: Everyone realized that they have ADHD.
Nick Kaman, Aggro Crab studio head: We were doing click speed runs. So we would set a phone timer to one minute and see how fast everyone could click in that one minute. That was really fun. We were just all very engrossed by the clicker.
Nelson: It was just a deeply satisfying object. As we were talking it would get passed around and clicked and someone would find some new way to use it in that very casual, delirious way that you gain of looking at the world in a new light at 3 am.
Porter: It’s got to be 11 pm, maybe midnight.
Hughes: Time was not relevant anymore. We were all consumed with this idea.
Porter: They were talking about sharing the clicker and clicking it at the same time together, and how that was kind of an uncomfortable thing, even though it's just a little clicker. But it’s an uncomfortable thing to ask someone, “Would you like to click this with me?”
Victoria Tran, Innersloth comms director: For most of the night, Xalavier was like “Victoria, this clicker is amazing.” Everyone was trying to convince me like, “Hey, this clicker, it will change your life. It is so satisfying.”
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Nelson: “Hey, do you want to hit this?” And Victoria goes, “No, no, I can't. I'll be addicted.”
Tran: I feel like clicking this clicker is such an intimate experience. I don't want to do it all in front of you. I don't want to click it with somebody else. This is a me thing.
Dan Tan, Innersloth senior artist: I think that's when the twisted creative Xalavier cogs really clicked into place and he just took it and ran.
Nelson: I'm a problem-solver. So I say, “Well, if someone else holds it and you click it or vice versa, you don't have to take on the full moral or physical burden of having clicked it, but you will have clicked it nonetheless. You are absolved, your sin is shared.”
Tran: Absolutely not. Why did I not want to? I'm not sure. I just think it’s funny. I'm not like other girls.
Kaman: That transitioned into talking about this concept of clickolding, someone else clicking for your enjoyment.
Tan: The next logical step was just to have someone else click the clicker entirely, but in a fun little slightly uncomfortable twist, it's for your own gain. The same vibe of comments the masked guy in the game makes. Xalavier was already hashing it out, while I think someone from Aggro Crab was clicking. "Slower … faster … you click real good."
Nelson: At a certain point, Nick gets tired. He's not clicking at this point anymore. He takes a chair from the table nearby. We're standing up and clicking because this is serious business. He pulls it up and he sits down and he's watching the clicking still happen, and I make the joke: “Are you really doing that right now, dude, are you clickolding us?”
Tan: It was so incredibly apt that there clearly was no other possible name for a game based on this bizarre clicker moment.
Porter: Whenever [Nelson’s] around these sorts of conversations or jokes or whatever tend to happen because he's so easy to “yes and” with. He'll say something and he'll just build onto it. Things just click; the scope of the joke or the story, whatever we're talking about.
Tran: I feel like a lot of the night kind of boiled down to that viral tweet that was “never underestimate the game design decision of, it'd be really funny though.” Most of us were sober. I think the Aggro Crab folks were the ones who were drinking. I forgot what drink it was.
Kaman: Several Four Lokos.
Tran: I don't know what that says about us that we still came up with this basically completely sober.
Kaman: Those things are insane. I don't know what they put in those, but it's nothing good.
The night begins to take a more serious turn when Nelson begins recording the group’s ideas.
Kaman: Xalavier—he's not drinking, he's got a notepad out.
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Tran: You may see this with other game designers—the minute they pull out a notebook, it's over. It's in there. They're like, “I'm making this game.”
Nelson: There is a way to turn this into more than a sex joke made at 3 am at GDC. I pulled out my notebook right then and there and started writing.
Kaman: We're all just bullshitting here. But he's taking notes, and he's leading the discussion.
Porter: At some point he said, I'm going to make this into a game. And if anyone else says that, you're kind of like, OK, yeah, that's funny. But with him, he actually might do this. He actually might find the resources to make this game.
Kaman: Xalavier’s this interesting character in the industry. He's always got 10 projects spinning at once, and you wonder how he does it. But seeing him in action is just awesome. You can see just how quickly he puts together the beats of the thing.
Porter: I'm pretty sure he started messaging people right there trying to get a team together to make it.
Nelson: While we were in that room joking, “ha ha,” I was reaching out to a couple members of my team and saying, “Hey, would you build this?” We're making this game for better and worse.
Porter: Xalavier and many others at the table were very adamant that this game and this concept isn't a sexual thing. It's not like a fetish or some weird depraved thing.
Nelson: The final version of this game is going to say and do some serious shit, because otherwise it is a shit post that needs to be left in that golden hotel room at 3 am. If you can tell a joke that makes someone feel when they didn't expect to be feeling, when they expect it to be giving the funny ha-ha or creepy clicking game, then you can do something really special.
Tran: I forgot to mention that this entire time we're all talking, Forest [Willard, Innersloth cofounder] is crying. I've not seen this man cry.
Porter: I've never seen Forest laugh this hard.
Tran: He is laughing so hard that there are tears running down from his eyes.
Kaman: Forest and Victoria run Outersloth, which is Innersloth’s publishing wing, and we're all kind of trying to bully them into signing Clickolding and funding the project. Keep in mind, this was all a joke the whole time.
Tran: We’d do it. Don’t at us, we’d do it.
Hughes: I'm so out of the loop, I thought Outersloth was a joke [Nelson] made up.
Kaman: We were saying, OK, we will bargain with you. We'll call it Victoria Tran’s Clickolding, like Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy.
Hughes: She was very much not a fan of that.
Kaman: I still think it would've been great.
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Tran: When Xalavier pitched the amount that he wanted, Forest, with tears in his eyes, could barely get the words out. He’s like, “Just take the money.” I was like, OK, I guess this is happening.
Nelson: If you make a game faster or more cheaply, you can justify its existence far more easily. There's a version of Clickolding that costs $500,000. That game doesn't exist. The version of Clickolding that does exist costs $25,000.
Tran: Obviously at this point we had to do it. There were witnesses.
Nelson: I do believe I also called Forest a coward and that he would be judged by God if he did not stand behind the objects of creation that he had been involved with and had become an accomplice to.
Tran: A huge part of the reason we were comfortable with even saying that is because Xalavier has that track record of oh, he can make this. But not only that he can make this maybe messed-up game that we still aren't sure what the entire story premise is. He would do it in a way that isn't horrifying in a cancelable way.
Nelson: As long as you're willing to commit to the full consequences of being associated with this joke for all of eternity, it can inherently justify itself as something that is not under the same scrutiny and need to return profit as a normal project.
Tran: We still have morals.
The impromptu brainstorming session was also where ideas like the game’s logo–which dances around the joke of “cuckolding” with a little typography—came from.
Nelson: Gary said, you're going to make the typography with real blocky letters.
Porter: If you write the name of the game in all block letters, capitalized, and have them really close together the L and the I look like a U.
Nelson: He did it like James Cameron pitching Aliens.
Porter: He starts to hand me a notebook, but then hesitates and stops as if it's some sacred thing that I'm going to defile by writing something in this book.
Nelson: I may or may not have given him a different pen so he could not defile the pen that I was currently working with with whatever he was about to draw.
Porter: I mean, at the time I didn't even think the game was going to be made, but I definitely didn't think he'd go with that [logo].
Many real-life details from that night made it into the final game, including an outfit one of Innersloth’s senior artists, Dan Tan, was wearing.
Nelson: Dan was wearing a brown jacket and an off-white shirt with blue stripes, jeans, and boots. It was a very chic and good outfit.
Tran: Xalavier for some reason was obsessed with this outfit.
Tan: He looks up from his notebook at me who's sitting across the table—note that pretty much this whole time, I'm completely exhausted from the day and am mostly just along for the ride—and he's like: "And THAT'S the outfit!"
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Nelson: I took a picture. I cropped it so that his face could not be seen. And we used that reference photo a month later.
Tan: I thought he was joking. The outfit the mystery man is wearing in the game is pretty much exactly what I had on that day, minus the mask, stripes, and questionable stains.
Nelson: If I was telling a story about a distressing and distressed masked man who wanted you to not just click a tally counter, but wanted to watch you do it, this everyman outfit with a slight elevation of style could end up being the foundation of a character design.
Porter: It was just a tan jacket.
Nelson: Even though I did get his permission at the time, many people don't understand the full implications of their actions and decisions and permission they give at 3 am.
Porter: I mean, it looked very stylish. Dan looked good.
Kaman: It's not like something to make fun of. And that's kind of why it was funny, because there's nothing wrong with Dan to justify making fun of him. It's just like you have the target on you now.
Nelson: I hope in this life or the next, he can forgive me.
While many of the developers involved that night left San Francisco without giving another thought to Clickolding, Strange Scaffold got to work. The studio did, in fact, go on to collaborate with Outersloth on the game. As they released promotional material, the developers involved in its conception had an array of reactions.
Tran: Well, it was horrifying.
Kaman: We were like, “What the fuck?” He's a madman, but he's also my greatest inspiration in life.
Tan: After seeing the teaser, I remember messaging Xalavier right away being like “I can’t believe you actually used my outfit for this!!!”
Tran: The first thing I saw was the character, horrifying. Two, it was like, I can't believe this is happening, even though I knew it was. Three, wow, I can't believe this joke, this thing that started off as just like a funny ha-ha, this thing that just had escalated into an actual game. Honestly, it just felt really cool.
Kaman: We were sharing it around in Slack, losing our minds, just being so impressed at the commitment.
Tan: Despite it all being born from something that started off lighthearted and a little silly, the game is most definitely no joke; it definitely taps into that uncomfortable feeling we got a glimpse at in the hotel lobby that night.
Tran: It's really cool to see all the things that we talked about coming together, like Dan's outfit or Gary's logo, and that kind of weird creative spirit. Having something feel real, amazing.
Kaman: I think Aggro Crab deserves royalties.
