One small indie developer has accidentally saddled itself with almost 65,000 extra people to thank after initially asking for 100 names to pad out its credits

You know, if you're a small game development team it probably makes sense you'd want to pad out your credits lest you end up with a "produced, directed, written, and starring" situation. But I assume that Japanese indie studio ConnectedShadowGames wasn't exactly expecting over 60,000 people to request a special thanks as the credits roll.

As reported by Automaton Media, the studio's currently working on Twilight Moonflower—the Steam page describes it as "a Japanese-style horror game for one-to-four players set in randomly generated residential neighbourhoods" if that's your bag—slated for a release at some point in the next couple of months.

On November 9, the developer tweeted out for help making the game's credits a little more substantial. "With only a few people working on it, we're desperately short on names," a translation provided by Automaton read. "If you want your name credited, please give [this post] a like! We genuinely will credit everyone."

The developer said it only needed "about 100 more names to cover the duration of our credits' footage," but managed to multiply that by just a little bit—a follow-up tweet just a day later noted that there had been almost 65,000 people who had liked the tweet.

"Thank you to all 64,901 applicants! We are men of our word," the tweet read. "We swear to ensure every single one of you makes it into the ending credits."

I mean hell, that's certainly one way to get eyes on your game. That's potentially over 60,000 people who might not have even looked twice at Twilight Moonflower otherwise, and many more (like me and now probably you) who wouldn't have come across this game had it not been for these tweets popping off. In a landscape where thousands of games are actively desperately trying to vie for our attention, it's slightly unconventional methods like this that I really dig.

And as Automaton notes, ConnectedShadowGames isn't the first to try this. Earlier this year, one developer found themselves saddled with the task of creating a mighty long end credits after getting over 200,000 people to like a post for the equally lengthily-named game Dragon's Chronicles: The Dark Demon King and the Sword of the North Star.

I have to wonder what a credits sequence with almost 65,000 names will look like. Will every name be teeny-tiny, squashed together like sardines? Or will the scroll speed fly by at a rate where participants might blink and miss their own contribution if they're not careful? Personally I like a combination of the two—a fun little extra challenge of trying to find your name after beating the game.