'We ended up flipping a coin': Slay the Spire devs left it up to pure chance whether they'd make a sequel or something else
Deckbuilding roguelike Slay the Spire hasn't left the PC Gamer Top 100 since it came out despite inspiring hundreds of imitators, a testament to how precisely it bullseyed assembling a hand of cards so powerful you become a god. Now it seems the game most likely to usurp it is Slay the Spire 2, which is coming in March 2026—though there was apparently a 50% chance that the indie team at Mega Crit Games would never make a sequel.
"We had been working on a bunch of tiny projects, little prototypes, and were having fun but said 'okay, let's get together again,'" Mega Crit co-founder Anthony Giovannetti told PC Gamer in an interview for The PC Gaming Show: Most Wanted. This was during Covid, when the two were ready to tackle a project they could really sink their teeth into. That project being another Slay the Spire was not a given, despite having sold well over a million copies by then.
"We had different paths we could work on," Giovanetti said. "One was a completely different project, and one was the sequel. I thought there were some interesting design challenges to work on a sequel with. We ended up flipping a coin, actually, and Slay the Spire 2 won out. So we started working on it, and the rest is history."
The co-founders are serious about the coin toss: they really would've made a different game had it landed Spire side down. Despite how huge a decision that seems to be—and I guess due to the whole pandemic thing—they didn't actually even do the coin toss in person.
"I don't think I actually saw the coin," Giovannetti said. "I want to say we were in a Discord call, and I think he just told me the result of the coin, which, in retrospect, is maybe questionable. But I believe he told me the true result. I think Casey would've massively preferred the coin went the other way, because I was always the card game person, and he was the action game person."
Still, Yano said there were reasons he was up for making a sequel, even if he was drawn to the project represented by the flip side of the coin. Slay the Spire felt like "unfinished business" to an extent, as later updates to the game had become laborious as they tried to keep console and mobile ports in sync with the PC version. Starting with fresh tech would make it easier to execute ideas they still had for a deckbuilder.
"I'm not really a future thinker," he said. "I don't really think about the next few years. I'm kind of a people pleaser—I just want to make things that I think people want. It seemed like a good idea. It might take a few years, maybe I was thinking we could finish it earlier, but here we are four-and-a-half years later, and we're still working on it."
Slay the Spire 2 will launch into early access in a few months with more of everything in it, though Yano said he's "such a spoiler hater" that he's hesitant to say much more than that.
"There are a lot of bosses already, a lot of enemies, a lot of events—probably more than the first game just on early access launch," he said. "I guess the starting line is kind of like the finishing line for the first game."