Frankly, I'm scared. It feels like just yesterday I went to sleep in a world in which the phrase "Dave the Diver" was no more than a meaningless burble. A reference, perhaps, to the speaker's mate Dave, who dives. Now look at us. The whole world is in the hot grip of Dave-mania: The game has an "overwhelmingly positive" Steam user review score, and developer Mintrocket has just announced it's already sold over a million copies.

A million! I don't think I've done anything a million times, and I've been out for way longer than Dave the Diver. And yet, apparently, the game sold "over a cumulative 1 million copies" in its first 10 days on the market, in which time it also hit 98,000 concurrent users, 66,000 Twitch viewers, climbed to the global #2 spot on Steam's top sellers chart, and comprehensively dominated the PC Gamer staff Slack.

I think we've got a phenomenon on our hands, folks. Dave the Diver seems to be doing in 2023 [[link]] what Vampire Survivors did last year, popping up out of nowhere to ambush bestseller [[link]] charts and take our hearts by storm. It's earned its success. The game's potent blend of spearfishing and sushi-serving is, apparently, sating a secret hunger that the videogame-playing public has been harbouring for years. 

It's even got renowned cinematic hater Chris Livingston pining for more cutscenes, which is a perturbing new reality we're all just going to have to learn to live with.

I'm [[link]] gonna go ahead and prophesy that Mintrocket won't rest on its laurels with this one, and that there's probably a great deal more Dave the Diver to come. Over on Steam, the devs put out a celebratory news post thanking their 1,000,000+ new fans, promising that they remain "committed to carefully listening to your opinions and continuously adding enjoyable and exciting content". A little vague, perhaps, but I imagine they might be as surprised by the game's overnight success as anyone.