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.
