Life is a series of battles, and I just lost my last one against four gyoza on a skewer. It was an unexpected blow, because honestly, who could have expected me — a springy, respectably proportioned hot dog — to lose against a seemingly inflexible spear of small, unassuming dumplings? This is my struggle in Sausage Legend: Arena, a mobile game with a very simple premise: duel with other players’ sausages and win.

On the surface, it looks like a garden-variety mobile game riddled with bugs (it is). But the difference between Sausage Legend and a fleeting idea you had after overdoing it on edibles is that 3.5 million people have played Sausage Legend, it has been on Japanese national television, and it is shockingly fun. And with an upcoming release on Steam, it’s poised to get even bigger.

As befits combat that demands swatting two wieners at each other, Sausage Legend is a heavily physics-based game. Each sausage is thrust onto the battlefield by a fork; players flop their sausages around to bludgeon each other to death. As someone with the vestigial sensibilities of a 13-year-old shitposter, I love this ballet of well-timed jabs and opportunistic ripostes, all while I admire the resilience and elasticity of my humble meat sword.

I fight lightning-infused cocktail sausages and weisswurst. There are brats and goteborgs, as well as pickled cucumber and a slice of pepperoni pizza (which, I guess technically contains sausage). There are more than 50 different sausages and other food items, each with different advantages — length, strength, special powers, and so on. My health bar smugly refuses to replenish between rounds. I learn that at some point, I will encounter a chrome-covered metal sausage that looks like something out of the deepest pit of T-1000 Terminator fanfic. There are barely any instructions, there are tedious ads, and when I reopen the game, it has not saved my meager progress. And yet, I crave more sausage.

For developer Tadaki Tani, the inspiration behind Sausage Legend didn’t come from playing with his food. “In the beginning, we found giraffes fighting on YouTube and the giraffes were ‘hanging’ their heads around and round, and that’s how we got the first idea [for the game],” he explains through a translator. The first prototype of the game used giraffes, but the fighting scenes didn’t quite work out. Why not try sausages? And so, in 2016, Sausage Legend was born.

Tani is the CEO of MilkCorp, a studio he founded in 2009 that offers meme-y mobile games like My Grizzly Bear, Sleep In Office, and Pollen Heaven. My Grizzly Bear is exactly what it sounds like — a free grizzly bear care simulator whose official page (correctly) reads, “The only people who would think of doing something like that are Youtubers desperate for views.” Pollen Heaven is a self-described “silly game” based on Tani’s own hay fever. Sausage Legend: Arena 2, its Japan-only sequel, features a medieval story world where slaves must sausage-duel for their freedom. The development team consists of Tani, and one other person.

The biggest boost to Sausage Legend came from a niche corner of the internet: a Hololive vtuber named Oozora Subaru, who became besotted with the original game and plays it obsessively to the delight (or chagrin, in some cases) of her fans. (We did reach out to Hololive’s parent company Cover for comment, but it did not respond.) In 2021, Subaru got her own legendary sausage in Sausage Legend 2, styled like a duck, which is her informal mascot. Her fellow vtuber Hakui Koyori also got a special sausage: the “Koyori Skin of the Large Intestine” sausage which sported a fluffy pink tail. “There are a lot of people playing because of her,” Tani says, noting that it took around 10 of her streams to see a noticeable uptick in players.

Later this year, Tani is going to release an expanded version of Sausage Legend: Arena on Steam — essentially a more filled-out Sausage Legend 2 story mode with added features. Slaves must take up arms (sausages) to fight for their freedom in a spectacular pastime favored by nobles: the sausage duel. There will be a deckbuilding mechanic to help you strategize the duels a little better — “the character doesn’t heal itself, but the cards will help you do that,” Tani says — as well as a few new modes and moves.

“We want to expand the game, and we want [more] people to know about it,” Tani says earnestly, before presenting me with a little acrylic standee of a hot dog. Sausage Legend’s upcoming release on Steam is poised to bring the game to a wider audience, one that I fervently hope will include avid modders. Half of the playerbase is Japanese, while the rest are overseas in the US and Taiwan, with France coming in fourth. Tani and I are both surprised that Germany isn’t in the top five; his favorite sausage type is weisswurst, which seems appropriate in the canon of significant video game sausages.

After the successful collaborations he’s had — crossovers with the 2016 movie Sausage Party, Morinaga Pino ice-cream, and Hololive — I ask if he would consider working with Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest, perhaps even the Olympics of sausages. “If there is a chance, we would love to,” he says with a smile. “Just eating a hot dog is the best way to eat a sausage.”