That was a big deal. But after that, the campaign stopped being about money, and started being about a community,” they wrote in an update to backers as the crowdfunding campaign ended. “On the very first day of this campaign, we hit our funding goal. The card game was created by former Xbox executives Elan Lee and Shane Small, and Matthew Inman, creator of popular online comics site The Oatmeal. However, Exploding Kittens is the most popular project ever in terms of the number of backers, according to Kickstarter, more than doubling the previous record of 105,857 backers held by children’s literacy project Reading Rainbow. That put Exploding Kittens behind only drinks cooler Coolest and smartwatch Pebble in Kickstarter’s most-funded list, with those projects having raised $13.3m and $10.3m respectively.