The recently released Shovel Knight from Yacht Club Games has made quite a splash in the gaming community thanks to its 8-bit inspirations and solid challenge, and soon you'll be able to immerse yourself in the world of Shovel Knight and the Order of No Quarter beyond just playing the video game. As YCG's Nick Wozniak explained on Episode 138 of the Power Button podcast, the company has big plans for Shovel Knight merchandise. They already have a deal with popular online retailer ThinkGeek to produce toy shovels, for instance. Here's the what Wozniak had to say about merchandising (where the real money from the game is made!) on the podcast:

That's the stuff that we're trying to do right now, actually. It's another facet of making Shovel Knight a part of your life. We're working on figures... I'm not totally if sure if they're going to be action figures, we're still working on figuring that out, but we have figures in the works. We also just announced ThinkGeek is doing some of those foam shovels in the same vein as those Minecraft foam swords. We want people to be doing stuff with the property just like having fun with the toys. We would love to inundate everyone with as much Shovel Knight as possible not because that's the best way to make money, but because it's coming from a place of wanting to just have Shovel Knight be a part of your life, like you can own anything Shovel Knight.



Even though technology has progressed from the Nintendo Entertainment System era, characters rendered in that style still have a lot of personality and the Shovel Knight cast are the latest crew to be brought to vivid life with mere pixels. I bet the toy shovels will prove to be popular among fans. Wozniak also talks of YCG's plans for marketing domination with ideas for Shovel Knight bedsheets, action figures, shampoo (where the bottle has Shovel Knight himself for a cap and you'd unscrew his head to open it), and a breakfast cereal. I really hope that the commercial for Shovel Knight cereal features an antagonist called Breakfast Knight who is already trying to steal the village's cereal. For more on Shovel Knight's future, be sure to listen to the podcast in which we discuss future free updates to the game that will add more playable characters & game modes, when we can expect to see the game arrive on other platforms, and what it would take for the company to move on to Super Shovel Knight developed in a 16-bit visual style.