When the Mewgenics team announced in 2024 that it had added autism to the list of disorders the game’s cats could inherit, developer Edmund McMillen — best known as the co-creator of Super Meat Boy — was unprepared for the reaction. 

“It was like the most positive response I’ve ever had to anything I posted,” he says. On Reddit and TikTok, fans expressed gratitude and excitement for the inclusion. “Everybody was like, ‘This is the perfect representation for autism. I feel seen,’ etc., etc.,” McMillen says. “That felt like somebody opened the door and said, ‘Go on. Go ahead, do your thing.’”

Mewgenics, which launched for PC on February 10th, is the year’s first surprise indie hit. Announced in 2013, it was originally a Team Meat title from McMillen and Tommy Refenes; McMillen saved the project after it was put on hiatus. A darkly funny and deceptively complex combo of adorable characters, roguelike gameplay, and tactical roleplaying, Mewgenics is, as the pun in its name suggests, a game about breeding and bloodlines. It’s currently Steam’s top-selling game this week. Co-creator Tyler Glaiel told IGN it took less than three hours to recoup development costs, while McMillen tells The Verge the game is already expected to top 500,000 units sold. “It’s blown past anything I’ve ever done by a mile,” he says. 

The game’s arrival in 2026, when misinformation about disorders like autism is rampant and pro-eugenics attitudes abound, is eerily topical, albeit accidental. McMillen, to be clear, has not created an intentional commentary on the state of the world. “I hate politics,” he says. “It’s a game about cats fucking, you know what I mean?”

There is a deluge of mutations and disorders cats can inherit in the game — from bad gas or kidney stones to ADHD and depression — that impact their stats. ADHD gives players only seconds to make decisions or the cat will start acting on its own. Autism includes accelerated intelligence but lower charisma; the cat will be naturally very good at the abilities they’re born with, but other skills might be a little more difficult. “I’m very well versed in this,” McMillen says. “I have two children that are on the spectrum, and I have a wife who is as well. … It has been a big part of my life for the past 10 years.”

Mewgenics includes over 100 disorders — name one, McMillen says, and it’s probably in the game — but each has its own silver lining. The point isn’t to immediately dump cats with certain disorders, but to appreciate them. “I want people to play and read between the lines,” McMillen says. “I want you to have a cat with autism, and instead of throwing it away, realizing its strengths and embracing the challenge and potential that that cat would have.”

Mewgenics is a personal project for McMillen, one that haunted him for years when it was unfinished. “I fell in love with the characters, and I fell in love with the world, and I fell in love with the things that I thought were interesting and fun about the genetic aspect of it,” McMillen says. The game’s road to release has been over a decade in the making; following their success with Super Meat Boy, he originally conceived the project with Refenes. While the original project was about cat breeding and the genetics involved, McMillen says, it wasn’t actually much of a game. “It was like a toy, a little idle game where you would breed your cats, and then you’d use your cats in minigames,” McMillen says. 

After 18 months of development and a public showing at PAX, however, McMillen says that Refenes’ enthusiasm for the project had waned. “It was very apparent that I was the only person that wanted to continue working on the project,” McMillen says. “And I can’t force somebody to just continue to work on something.” The pair decided to put the project on pause to work on another Super Meat Boy project. 

To McMillen’s surprise, he received an email from Steam expressing condolences about the game’s cancellation. After talking with Refenes, McMillen says, it became clear that Mewgenics would never happen while he worked at Team Meat. When McMillen left Team Meat in 2016, he took Mewgenics with him.

After teaming up with Glaiel, the two spent another six years reworking it into the massive game it exists as today; Glaiel did extensive amounts of research into breeding — and inbreeding — to work out the finer points of the game’s main mechanic. Felines can be any sexuality, and how their relationships progress is sometimes out of the player’s hands. “They can be very passive,” McMillen says. “They can have rivals. They can fall in love. They can be rejected.” Online, he’s said the game will take most players over 200 hours to finish.

Writing Mewgenics has made McMillen regard some of his previous work differently. He points specifically to The Binding of Isaac and its themes on nature versus nurture and “how nurture can really fuck a kid up.” Some struggles in life, however, are inherited. 

“The game definitely became more about children — the experience of raising children,” McMillen says, reflecting on how fatherhood changed his view of the game from its inception to release. “The legacy that you leave, and the genetics that you pass to them and curse them with. I started to write more from that perspective.”

Annemarie Rose is bent over a sheet of glass, hair tucked into a messy half ponytail, tracing the outline of a heart into its glossy surface. She breaks it apart, sands the edges, and etches a simple message across its smooth surface: spit in my mouth. “Something hot for Valentine’s Day,” the description reads on her TikTok video.

Commenters go wild, a chorus of desire filling the section. “WHERE CAN I BUY,” writes one enthusiastic viewer with a grip on their caps lock. Another helpfully adds a backstory: “I NEED THIS because I got blocked for telling my crush to spit in my mouth and pull my hair so sad.” Back in the real world, a dumbfounded Annemarie watches as the numbers on her video skyrocket. Refresh. 100 new followers. Refresh. 500 more. As of late June, the video is sitting around 954,000 views, with her account up from a few hundred followers to over 10,000.

For Annemarie, virality translated to more than just views and comments. She had a surge of interest in her work as potential customers began lining up. In one day, she said 2,000 people joined her mailing list, a number her subscriptions in total had never touched. “The effect of that one video was really powerful for my business,” she said. When she opened pre-orders for mirrors, including the cheeky “spit in my mouth” version, she says they sold out in 18 minutes (a fact I can personally attest to after failing to buy one).

Her success through that one video is the result of a combination of things: the timing of a heart mirror collection coming up against Valentine’s Day, and the half-joking half-not brand of kink humor that permeates TikTok. But the platform is also key. TikTok is “an amazing place for artists,” she said, more so than platforms like Instagram or Twitter. “You can really get a lot of eyes on your work,” she said, pointing to the platform algorithm’s eerie ability to feed users hyper-specific content tailored to their interests. 

“There’s never been a more exciting time to be an artist,” she said. “There aren’t any gatekeepers left to prevent you from entering the art world. All you have to do is make art, say you’re an artist, and put it online.”

If you want to go viral, TikTok is now your best bet. The constant churn of trending sounds, remixable jokes, and the ability to land on anyone’s “for you” page puts it above platforms like Twitter. There, true virality inevitably leads to, at best, degeneration of your original message, or worse becoming the dreaded main character of Twitter. For artists like Annemarie, platforms like Instagram are also in a constant state of free fall. “Instagram’s very miserable for small artists,” she said. Over time, she’s noticed her analytics drastically drop while Instagram pushes pay-for-post visibility. “Every time there’s a new Instagram update, it basically gets worse.”

Annemarie started selling her work in farmer’s markets, but quickly learned it’s a tough crowd for art. People are there to buy freshly baked bread and fruit above supermarket quality, not mirrors to hide from your mother. “I don’t sell out of all of my products at a market the way I do online,” she says. “When I drop an online collection, I sell over like 60 mirrors in five minutes.”

A “spit in my mouth” mirror is perfect bait for TikTok, where taboo trends are discussed as openly as blue checks showing off a new dance. Creators are fearless, discussing everything from mental health struggles to their interest in shibari and daddy kinks. It’s exploration by way of jest. In one popular trend, a girl exclaims “I would never let a man spit in my mouth. I don’t know why you all keep saying ‘oh spit in my mouth, spit in my mouth,’ that’s fucking nas–” before the audio cuts to a smattering of photos featuring whoever they would, actually, let spit in their mouth. “There’s also a lot of conversation around, ‘How do you express your needs to a partner?’ But then also doing funny little skits about it,” Annemarie says.

Through the video platform, she’s able to reach a wider audience located in different states or countries, and a thriving online business allows her to work from home — a key factor due to chronic pain and migraines she suffers from. “I kind of have a work-pain balance going on,” she says. She describes her migraines as debilitating, so intense she can’t even get out of bed. “Being self-employed has allowed me the flexibility to take time off,” she explains. “I really like to work late in the evening; optimal work time for myself is like 8PM to like 2AM.” 

Despite her work’s popularity online, Annemarie says it’s hard for her to define success within the parameters of cash flow alone. At markets, she connects with other artists in person. But online, her products sell in minutes — especially the “spit in my mouth” mirror. “That one is my best seller by far. It has been for every single collection.”

As for why it’s so popular? “People like it as a joke — or in all seriousness, they want someone to see it and spit in their mouth.” 

The layoffs happened suddenly. One day, Jose Abalos was employed, working on Disney Infinity 4. The next day, he was not. “It was something that upended everything, everything, all kinds of security,” he tells The Verge. “Everything just went belly-up in a single day.”

In May 2016, Disney Interactive shut down its internal studio, Avalanche Software, putting almost 300 employees out of work. For Abalos, there was an extra complication. He was working in the states on an H-1B1 visa, a limited program for workers in Singapore and Chile, that requires renewal every year. Abalos only had a month until his visa expired. Not only would he not get the padding of unemployment benefits for anything beyond that date, like his colleagues, but his visa would soon be void, forcing him to leave the country. His life went from “‘Hey, we’re working on Infinity 4, and this is awesome,’ to ‘Oh, shit. I need to find a job, like, now,’” he says. 

Every year, developers immigrate to the United States to pursue careers in game development. For some people, like Abalos who grew up in Chile, the US offers more opportunity than their home countries, where development communities can be small. According to the Entertainment Software Association’s 2020 economic impact report, the US industry alone supports 143,000 jobs directly. It is home to major developers like Electronic Arts, Valve, and Activision Blizzard across cities big and small, including New York, Los Angeles, Seattle, San Francisco, Salt Lake City, and Raleigh.

Regardless of location, however, maintaining a successful game development career is always a challenge. Every year, studios suffer major layoffs, uprooting the lives of their employees. For immigrant workers, the problem is more complex. They don’t just lose a job. They might be forced to abandon their lives entirely and leave the country. This fear trickles down into different aspects of their careers, limiting where developers can afford to take jobs and how much leverage they have to ask for better pay or work conditions once they’re in.

“It was every day, just desperately looking at job searches,” Abalos says. “Whoever wants to take me, I’ll do it.”  

For developers here on visas, time is of the essence. In October 2020, Jennifer Scheurle lost her job suddenly after the project she’d been working on was canceled. Under her O-1 visa, which is given to people with “extraordinary ability or achievement,” she had only 60 days to transfer her visa to another company or leave the country. She started her job hunt that day. “Within the games industry, specifically, getting hired within two to three months is just not a thing, or really rare and difficult to do,” she tells The Verge.

Her health insurance would run out in roughly two weeks. “I lost my ability to go and see my therapist because I didn’t have coverage anymore, which is tough when you’re trying to figure out how to get your life in order,” she says. The project she’d poured her heart into for years was suddenly gone. Her life was thrown into a pressurized timeline of just 60 days, which she says is just not enough. “You have zero time to process what just happened to you. You have zero time to just understand what that means for your life.”

The process can — and usually does — take months. Recruiters typically wait to attract a wide pool of candidates, who then go through an intensive screening and interview process. Developers may ask a candidate to meet large swaths of their teams, which adds up to hours of interviews. (Pre-COVID, this usually meant in-person gauntlets where a prospective hire could come to the company’s campus for an eight-hour day. As the industry works from home, more of that process is now relegated to video calls.) The long production time on video games, which take years to build, means companies must carefully consider who they want to bring on board. 

Scheurle describes a loss of agency in her own life. “I felt like it was not on my own terms,” she says. “I was forced into terms and decisions dictated by this timeline and the [US visa process], instead of me having a minute to think about what I want next.”

Contributions from immigrant developers are crucial to maintaining a diverse, and therefore strong, workforce. Employers want to cast a wide net, a recruiter within the games industry tells The Verge; it’s in a company’s best interest to explore talents, technical and artistic, that are vastly different from what they might find in the US alone. It’s impossible to directly track how this loss of talent impacts projects, both those being made now and yet to come. But that loss does exist. 

Problems don’t just apply to developers in the midst of their careers, but also to young developers hoping to find a job out of college. Raj* came to the States as a student and was, by all accounts, on a successful path. His game was nominated for student awards and received press coverage and accolades. With a strong portfolio and plans to publish his game, he hoped to start a visa process that would help him stay in the country. His team’s dreams for publishing through Nintendo, however, and later a crowdfunding effort, fell through. 

It was late April, and his visa was set to expire in May. He’d recently gotten engaged. At the behest of his lawyers, he was told not to leave the country, but rather start the green card process and try for parole that would allow him to stay in the country past his visa’s expiration. “We dropped everything to get this done within the two weeks we had,” Raj says. Instead of spending the year planning his wedding, he and his fiancé held a short ceremony in his in-laws’ backyard. His parents weren’t able to attend, but instead Skyped in. “We had to get everyone on the same page so quickly but we managed it somehow, and got the application submitted within time. Now I just had to wait.”

And he did, for nearly seven months. The initial estimate of three months had stretched on, as complications arose from Trump administration policies. In the meantime, he was unable to take on any work. He was told “to stay indoors as much as possible so as to stay away from ICE agents. There was a very real concern on my lawyer’s end that I could mistakenly end up in a border camp.”

That time was challenging for Raj, a self-proclaimed nervous wreck who was “basically under house arrest” for fear of being deported. “I’d now been in the US for months on end with an expired visa and we were terrified we’d hear a knock on the door and it would be an ICE agent,” he says. “I had no idea how long this would continue, or when we’d run out of money. I knew I wasn’t doing well mentally at this point but we couldn’t afford therapy, and I no longer had access to any form of insurance, nor could I apply for any.”

The problem is compounded by the need for many developers who come to the US on visas to have senior-level experience or positions already, the recruiter tells The Verge. Their on-paper qualifications and even country of origin vastly impact the kind of visa they might be able to apply for. Even with a job offer, some developers have had to forfeit those positions because the company couldn’t work out visa issues. Contract work is often inaccessible to developers not able to work in the US. “It’s an impossible fucking process where we lose out on talent on such a massive scale,” Scheurle says. Developers with less experience aren’t allowed to work in positions that might get them the skills they need to ascend to senior talent. 

It also keeps developers from seeking out smaller companies that might afford them better or more creative opportunities in favor of a larger developer with a bigger bank. To get a visa, any visa, costs thousands of dollars and the help of a good immigration lawyer; some visas, like H-1B, follow strict timelines and approval caps. There’s little margin for error. 

“At the end of the day, the company also has to make a request for the visa, and the smaller companies just don’t know how to deal with it,” Abalos says. “Whereas a big company, like, say, Activision or Ubisoft, they have entire departments that deal only with that. That’s their sole purpose.”

It’s an exhausting amount of pressure. “There were points, like, why do I even keep bother trying?” Abalos says. “I mean, should I just start focusing instead on packing everything up and leaving.” Scheurle says the experience made her doubtful that she’d ever want to return to the States. “I love the US and the people as a place,” she says. “I just don’t ever want to go through that again. I want to be somewhere where people appreciate the humanity and what it means to move countries.”

Abalos was able to find a job and stay in the country, while Scheurle took a job in Vancouver. Raj still works in games today but says the trauma of his visa struggles continues to affect him. “I still have episodes now and then, and I can’t cope with high pressure environments like I used to,” he says.  

Many of the developers The Verge spoke to still consider themselves to be privileged cases, whether because of their race, education, or financial status. They call themselves examples of best-case scenarios: people who either managed to stay in the country or found lucrative jobs elsewhere. 

Reflecting on his own experience, Raj, too, sees what he considers privileges. “I would have been deported a hundred times over without all the advantages I had,” he says, pointing to things like his industry accolades, financial support from his family, and access to an immigration lawyer. He calls his ordeal a hellish experience, but still one with positive outcomes that include a happy marriage. “I know from hearing what friends have also gone through that the stories we don’t hear are even more frightening, even more tragic.” The US, in particular, became a harder place for any immigrant to work under Trump. 

“I hope that in sharing my story,” Raj says, “a story where things ‘worked out,’ it helps people have more understanding and empathy for the ones that didn’t.”

*Name has been changed to protect the individual’s identity.

Fortnite has added a new skin to its collection that may look a touch familiar to internet dweebs. Diamond Hanz, introduced in Chapter 2, season 6, is a play on the beloved stonks man, but now on your squad.

By “stonks,” I am of course talking about this:

For 1,200 V-Bucks, this rugged and weirdly kind of hot version of Mr. Stonks (a Megan Farokhmanesh™ official, do not steal) can be yours. He’s here to dance and ruin my life.

Fortnite has an already admirable collection of skins celebrating pop culture, fruit, and more, but this one is especially… special. Why anyone would suddenly be interested in stocks, I can’t possibly imagine. It’s not like there’s been any reason to talk about stocks lately, particularly in relation to video games. GameStop? Never heard of it!