It was an exciting day for developer Strange Scaffold. In less than 24 hours, it would launch its next game, Sunshine Shuffle, on PC and Nintendo Switch. The narrative poker game about cute animals had been slowly building momentum ever since it was announced on a Day of the Devs stream last November. On the eve of its release, the studio was preparing for a fairly routine launch for its indie hidden gem.
Hold ’em Sunshine Shuffle is a hybrid of Animal Crossing and Poker Night at the Inventory, a short-lived series of narrative poker games from Telltale Games. In it, players take the role of a detective who’s joined a poker tournament on a boat with a group of animals called the Morning Shift. Through rounds of Texas Hold ’em, the characters at the table slowly detail that they were part of a heist that went wrong and tell their life stories in the process.
“I had to find a way to talk about this game that we cared about and do that in a way that didn’t rely on capturing perfect, seamless game footage,” Nelson Jr. says. “So I was going to talk about the story and the themes and what it was achieving, and the tagline I landed on. ‘Hey, it’s a game that doesn’t teach kids how to gamble.’ The obvious concern I had was that people were going to get angry at us for playing a game where you have gambling occurring and it looks like it’s a game for kids.
Fold ’em Through the months leading up to Sunshine Shuffle’s launch, it didn’t seem like any platform holder was in danger of falling for that joke. But as the launch day approached, two very big things went wrong at once. The most major problem came when Nintendo performed a final interrogation of the game before its launch. Despite the fact that the game has passed all its previous checks, the publisher began asking serious questions about its gambling mechanics.
“It’s obviously distressing to learn, the day before launch, that you aren’t going to be able to launch in the market of your primary audience,” Nelson Jr. says. “Like, I didn’t expect to sell copies in Korea! I think Korea’s really cool, but I wasn’t thinking about Korea for this game. So for it to emerge Super Smash Bros.