Death-seeking baby from Who’s your Daddy?! becomes a viral reaction image in Japan nine years after the game’s release
Who’s Your Daddy?!, an indie game from 2015, is going unexpectedly viral in Japan right now. Or rather, an image of the game’s trouble-seeking baby holding a knife has taken on a meme-like existence on the Japanese speaking side of social media site X.
For those reading this who are still going “what the heck is Who’s Your Daddy?!,” it’s a casual multiplayer title by Evil Tortilla Games. The premise of the comedic game involves a father struggling to keep his self-destructive infant alive.
In the game’s matches, players taking on the baby role actively try to destroy themselves by interacting with items and objects in the house and garden. A fork in a plug socket, a big sip of bleach or a tumble into the toilet bowl are possible options. Players taking on the Daddy role must prevent the baby’s destructive behavior and make sure any potentially dangerous household items are out of reach.
Despite the realistic and potentially tragic scenarios that can unfold, the game’s colorful graphics, crazy physics and comical tone make for an amusing experience, Who’s Your Daddy?! has racked up a Very Positive rating on Steam (80% of 23,786 reviews are positive), and is still getting content updates across most major platforms.
So why and how is this game suddenly a trending meme on Japanese social media? It seemingly all started on December 3, 2024- when an X user called Haze posted the following text accompanied by image of a baby from the game.
Image of a baby holding a knife from Who’s Your Daddy? becomes a Japanese meme
The meme-ability of the unhinged looking baby holding a rather threatening knife seems to have struck a chord with social media users. Not only has the original post gone viral, with over 5 million views and 5,000 reposts, but it has also prompted others to make their own fun captions for the image and other stills from Who’s Your Daddy?!
Most of the captions for the images follow the familiar “Me when ___” or “Mfw (my face when)___” meme format. Surreal and humorous images have been combined with this kind of phrase on Japanese social media before, and it seems that the baby from Who’s Your Daddy!? is the latest to be used in this way.
AUTOMATON Japan asked Haze about the reason for picking this striking image. Apparently, Haze did not realize the baby was from the game at first and just stumbled across it on the internet, choosing it because she liked the expression on the baby’s face. She does remember watching a livestream of the game some years ago and is now considering buying it. She has since posted other images from Whose Your Daddy?! with similar style captions.
Who’s Your Daddy?! is available on PC and Mac (Steam), PS4/PS5, Xbox Series X|S/Xbox One and Android.
