Kongpanions started out as the brain-child of two employees who wanted to come up with a way to make badge-earning even more compelling for players. The two of them walked into a conference room with a vague mission and walked out with the pitch to give out adorable collectible buddies as a prize for completing achievements in-game.

Since then, Kongpanions have been a community-building event and unofficial pictographic history for Kongregate, by naming them after employees, inside jokes, and silly puns. At one point, there was even a #who’s-that-kongpanion slack channel for collaborating on Kongpanion ideas!

Gizmo, Tricky, and Heather are three Kongpanions named after employees. Gizmo is based on our Chief Blockchain Operations Officer Michelle Shaw’s dog with the same name. Tricky comes from Director of Player Experience, Janet Ebsen and her Kongregate username ‘trickyrodent’ inspired by a family inside joke. The pumpkin Kongpanion, Heather, is named after our Senior Marketing Manager and resident Halloween enthusiast, Heather Gainer. The game Heather’s Halloween Christmas, created by community member Ruudiluca, was also inspired by her and features the Heather Kongpanion.

It’s been a few years since we’ve created new Kongpanions, but we’ve hired new people to the team, we’re publishing new games, and we’re in the process of relaunching the website - it’s time.

So, to keep up the tradition, we’re encouraging players to take part in our Who’s That Kongpanion activity on our Discord server as we start rolling out new Kongpanions to collect in addition to the Kongpanion-themed games we started releasing earlier this week, with Please Don’t Eat Me.

Who’s That Kongpanion is beginning on Discord today, Thursday April 6th, through Sunday at 11:59pm PST. Players will fill in the blank silhouette to guess who our NEW Kongpanion is. Based on our #who’s-that-kongpanion slack channel, players will have the opportunity to experience what it’s like to create & name a Kongpanion in the who's-that-kongpanion Discord channel!

Play Please Don’t Eat Me with us during our livestream this Friday at 10am PST, then enjoy more of our Kongpanion inspired games:

Absorber - An incremental idle fantasy game where you can absorb your enemies power by defeating them.

Kongpanion Katcher - See how many Kongpanions you can catch in 30 seconds! Owning the Kongpanion you catch gives you more points.

Kongpanion Park - Build an amusement park with Kongpanions! Kongpanion Park is an incremental idle game based around physics.

Kongportraits - Guess which Kongpanion Sketch the Pencil is drawing a portrait of.