Did Harry Potter accidentally help crowd-fund a video game about dragons?

Do you want to talk about sheer good fortune? Well, it doesn’t get better than this, folks. Video game developer Jonathan Slabaugh had a big stroke of luck recently — half a million dollars worth — and it may be credited to Harry Potter. Although he doesn’t seem to think so.

It began when Slabaugh started a Kickstarter campaign to raise $12,000 for his “open-world survival game”, Day of Dragons.

He ended up collecting $500,000. How the heck does that happen? It might be kindly fans eager to run around in a dragon-themed open world, but as fate would have it, Harry Potter: Wizards Unite unveiled a new in-game event about two days after Slabaugh launched his campaign. The name? Day of the Dragons. Are you picking up the similarities here?

When the Harry Potter game was searched on Google, it was leading people to the Kickstarter campaign. Before Slabaugh knew it, he had stacks of money in his Kickstarter! It looks like he’ll be able to work bigger and better on the project, a personal endeavor he began after his father passed away back in 2016.

Forbes reached out to Slabaugh for an interview. He declined, but did release a statement about how little Harry Potter had to do with this:

"I have never seen a Harry Potter movie, and I had no idea there was a ‘Day of the Dragons’ event until a friend found it when searching for ‘Day of Dragons’ and not for ‘Day of the Dragons’ as they were both showing up in Google search results. Not one person of all the 100’s of comments and feedback I’ve received once mentioned the Harry Potter event as the reason they found or pledged to our Kickstarter campaign. […] I don’t believe our success had anything to do with Harry Potter’s event, I believe it had to do with our grassroots community word-of-mouth through Discord and YouTube streamers who came together to help make our dream a reality. The major source of our success based on community feedback alone is Anthomnia’s YouTube coverage of our Kickstarter event which went viral on YouTube and has at the time of this writing, 951,000 views. That’s where the majority of our backers heard about our game, not from Harry Potter."

And that’s all plausible. Gamers have stepped up with funding plenty of times in the past. Buuuuut I think it’s hard to disclose the possibility that Harry Potter fans, who are also famously passionate, may have had something to do with it.

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But hey, either way, the guy gets to fulfill his dream, so there’s a happy ending.

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