The Rise And Fall Of The World’s Weirdest Game: Who’s Your Daddy?

Have you ever wanted to realistically experience the joys of raising and nurturing a child? Well, Who’s Your Daddy is not that. Who’s Your Daddy is a satire party game to play with friends, that was released on the 23^rd of December 2015 by Evil Tortilla Games. Who’s Your Daddy’s main plot is that your Mum has left the house for ten minutes, and in those ten minutes, one team plays as babies, trying to take themselves out of the realm of living, while the other team plays as the daddies, trying to stop their children from ending their lives by baby-proofing the house. The babies win if all children manage to die, and the daddies win if at least one baby survives the full ten minutes.

There are so many ways for the babies to hurt themselves it makes me scared to be a parent. Some of the most commons ways for the babies to win the game are poisoning, drowning, burning, freezing and electrocution. The dads can combat this in several ways, like using medicine or fruit to heal the baby, placing locks and outlet covers to stop the baby in the first place, or if you’re feeling lazy, you can just hold the thing. Even though you can only hold the child for a few seconds before they wriggle out, it can still mean the difference between an alive baby and deep-fried child.

This small indie game was first noticed by the world on December 9^th, 2015, when Pewdiepie, a Swedish man who primarily uploaded videos of gameplay with his commentary, uploaded a video showing him and another big creator at the time, Jacksepticeye, playing through the game. As of March 7^th, 2023 the video simply titled as ‘WHO’S YOUR DADDY? (1)’, has managed to garner 7.9 million views. Felix went on to create more videos mostly with Markiplier, Jacksepticeye, and CinnamonToastKen who also uploaded their POVs of the game to their own channels.

It is perfectly normal for games to be picked up by YouTubers, played to completion, and moving on to the next when the attention from the audience fades away. Most games are bound to this unfortunate fate including Who’s Your Daddy, but almost a year after release someone would continue to upload videos of this game and would also go on to be known for his Who’s Your Daddy videos: MessYourself. Brandon, more commonly known online as MessYourself, uploaded his first gameplay of Who’s Your Daddy on the 9^th of March 2016. Of course, the video got less views than Pewdiepie’s videos, still gaining an impressive amount of 6 million compared to Felix’s 7.9 million, but this video started a series that in total has over 100 million views, spans over six years and boosted Brandon into the spotlight. After the first couple videos the gameplay veered into more improv roleplay with friends than just running around, but still keeping the overall theme of ‘Dad protects baby from dying’.

During its peak of popularity Who’s Your Daddy was still in early access, so not much could be critiqued back then because everything could change in a new update, but looking back from where it has gone now in my opinion Who’s Your Daddy got and still gets boring quickly; it definitely is fun for a few gaming sessions, but after exhausting all the methods of killing most people lose interest. This repetitive cycle is common in most party games which is usually combated with alternate maps and game-modes, something that during its popularity in 2016-2017 Who’s Your Daddy lacked. Even with all its flaws, Who’s Your Daddy beat the odds, and with a lot of help from Brandon, charmed its way to most people’s memories as a silly little indie game of cat and mouse.

Is Who’s Your Daddy good? No. Would I recommend it? Absolutely. Do I understand why Who’s Your Daddy had people buying the game like it was Black Friday? I wish I could, but what I do know is that I’m glad I discovered a wacky game about the joys of parenthood and the hilarious creators that played it.