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The resulting game is a title that pokes fun at and also celebrates various elements of video game culture, including eSports, the regurgitation of classic movie lines, and fast-paced button mashing-focused insanity.

“The fall back was this would make a great GDC panel where I talk about how crowd design is the worst thing. I was worried this was just going to implode and that no one was going to like it. It turned out really fun [laughs],” said Mika.

Beyond how frantic and strange IDARB’s team-based gameplay is, there are a few other factors that make the title stand out from the slew of other indie games – namely a feature Mika calls “hashbombs.”

“The notion of a hashbomb was something we carried over from a couple of previous attempts at games that we were doing internally. I think the first game we tried to make was this quiz game, where we’d take trending topics from Twitter, and we’d remove them from people’s posts and you had to pick from a selection of trending topics that would fit in the post. It was really fun and comical, but it didn’t really work quite perfectly and we shelved it,” said Mika.

In IDARB, if players are live streaming their match on Twitch, viewers can post various hashtags to their stream – for example, #genesis, gives the game a very “Sega” look and #fireworks, lights up the sky with bright colours – in Twitch’s chat menu, a concept Mika says was born out of how fun it is to “troll” people in video games.

“The idea of trolling a game is so fun. It hearkens back to when I used to play Bomberman with my friends, or Dragonball Z, Street Fighter – Samurai Showdown was a big one – while we were playing everybody would mess with everybody and it was such a fun thing to do and drove people nuts,” said Mika.