It should be absolutely no surprise that Yotam Pappo, CEO of games studio Peerplay, decided that his company’s flagship mobile game, Merge Cruise, should be an uber-camp carnival of fun, set on a cruise ship.

Why? Because Pappo has been a leader in LGBTQ+ entertainment for decades. Prior to entering the games industry, he ran Arisa, the nightlife and music production company behind a prominent Middle Eastern gay party in Israel and Brazil, and was responsible for pop hits and gay anthems on the Mizrahi (Jewish of Middle Eastern and North African ethnicity) music scene.

“I spent most of my life actually creating LGBT content for straight people,” Pappo explains. “My entertainment business was very directed at the mass market – and it worked!”

In Merge Cruise, your job as a player is to merge items such as beach bags and swimwear, building up the bucks to restore a cruise ship to its former glory. And we know exactly how glorious it once was, because the game’s opening sequence shows a vibrant party scene adorned with Pride flags, plus the mysterious and tragic demise of the ship’s drag star Ella Vate.

For this year’s Pride, the team has added a host of additional features to celebrate. There will be a Pride Party Album with collectable cards from 15 sets featuring different facets of LGBTQ+ culture including Drag Ball, Stonewall ’69, Glitter Rave and more. Players will also be able to collect Benny’s Pride Pins throughout June and join a Drag Brunch in-game event.

“In basically every other entertainment vertical, you see LGBT content directed at women, who are the classic casual game players” says Pappo. “For example, Heated Rivalry, which was the TV biggest hit the past year, or Queer Eye.”

Of course, there was much more to this than just business. Pappo, who is gay himself, has had a long-standing professional relationship with Dean Simon, art director at Peerplay, who is also a gay man.

“Dean and I, we wanted to create a game for ourselves,” says Pappo. “We have been gamers and worked in games together for years in senior roles, and we never had a game that really included us in terms of the narrative and the content layer.”

“There are some games that have LGBTQ characters, but they are always the side characters, the best friend or the comic relief,” adds Simon. “We love those games too, but I guess no one was previously brave enough to put those characters in the centre and really go all in.”

In Merge Cruise all the central characters and themes are LGBTQ+. Chris, the designer who steers your merge efforts, Tyrell the chef, Mateo the creative director are all openly gay, while Benny the handyman is closeted. The game’s protagonist Kara is a lesbian, but you have to play through the game’s narrative to find out more about how this is revealed, with whom she develops a relationship and the complex dynamics it creates between her and the ship’s captain, her father. Of course you’re also solving a mystery involving a drag queen.

“We wanted to bring really good representation of the entire community to the game, but keep it very campy. It was obvious that we should have two drag queens who would have a feud, which is always funny. We knew we had to have the romance part and one character who is closeted, but trying to express how he feels,” explains Simon.

Being members of the LGBTQ+ community themselves, Pappo and Simon had the confidence to bring those narratives to the fore.

“It was really important for us that we were not just inventing stuff,” says Simon. “Besides the murder mystery, all the stories and relationships are based on events from real life, from our friends, from our family. It was really important for us to make it authentic... It comes from our deep gut.”

But on top of this, the team wanted the game to have broad appeal. “Most LGBTQ games are very niche, indie games,” says Simon. “When we decided that we were going to go fully in with the LGBTQ game, we wanted to make something mass market.”

With Merge Cruise, they have achieved it all. “Often when you play casual games, you don’t feel an emotional connection. We got a lot of positive reviews from the players who really feel seen and say they can relate to the game. It’s also one of the things that helps us keep our players playing for a long time,” explains Simon.

“One of the greatest advantages we have is that we’re really well-acquainted with LGBTQ+ entertainment,” Simon adds. “More than that, it just needed the gumption and determination and hard work that, not to brag, but only the gays can do.”