Horror-Based Submarine Video Game Sales Surged During Titan Search

The developer of a horror-based, submarine-centric video game said he was “pretty horrified” after the game trended on Twitter, driving a sales surge, as rescuers looked for the doomed Titan submersible this week.

David Szymanski, the developer behind the 2022 submarine game “Iron Lung,” shared a graphic that showed a jump in sales for the game starting on Monday as news spread about the search for the vessel and its five passengers.

“This feels so wrong,” wrote Szymanski in a tweet on Wednesday.

The game follows users as they “pilot a tiny submarine through an ocean of blood on an alien moon,” according to a synopsis on Steam.

“Iron Lung,” according to its description, features a sub with a “single porthole,” like the one on the Titan. “CBS Mornings” reporter David Pogue, who reported on the Titan last year, said the vessel was sealed with bolts from the outside and couldn’t be opened by those inside.

“There is only a single porthole on the sub, and it needs to be closed due to depth pressure, so you have to navigate purely via an incomplete map, proximity sensors, sound, and a primitive external camera ..,” reads the game description.

“I definitely see the dark humor in this whole Titanic sub thing, it’s just ... like, I made Iron Lung the most nightmarish thing I could think of, and knowing real people are in that situation right now is pretty horrific, even if it was their own bad decisions,” Szymanski wrote on Twitter.

“Like all the jokes I’ve been seeing are hilarious but also good lord nobody should have to die like that.”