Date Everything Devs Detail Its Origins, Characters, Voice Cast, and More

Releasing in June 2025, Date Everything is an exciting game that turns the dating simulator genre on its head. Unlike most games in the genre, players can date over 100 humanized household objects thanks to the mysterious glasses called “Dateviators” they receive in the mail. Date Everything is the first game from Sassy Chap Games, a development studio made up of veteran voice actors.

Game Rant spoke to Date Everything Lead Designer Ray Chase, Co-Creative Lead Robbie Daymond, and Producer Amanda Hufford about where the original idea for the game came from, how they chose actors to voice their cast of 100-plus characters, the reasoning behind the delay from February to June, and more. The team also revealed a brand-new character—Dante the Fireplace, voiced by Dante Basco—and promised there would be more exciting reveals during the remaining months until the game’s release. This transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity. This interview took place shortly after the recent delay announcement.

Chase, Daymond, and Hufford are all actors in the game as well.

The Origins Of Date Everything

Q: Could you tell us a bit about where the idea for Date Everything came from?

Daymond: So me and Ray and Max—that’s Max Mittelman, the other co-founder of Sassy Chap Games—we decided we were going to make a game together. We had the idea of creating a company, and me, Max, and Ray had worked together before. We knew we wanted to do something creative, so we had a bunch of pitches. We were looking at pitching shows. We were looking at doing podcasts, which Ray ended up doing with another friend in his production company.

We just wanted to make something creative that was our own, that wasn’t just a voiceover job we had booked. Ray had always had an interest in games: he’d been going to GDC and PAX for years. He had lots of friends in the community, so he said, “I want to make a game.” So one evening, we just started brainstorming, and, as many of our things do, this idea was thrown into the ether. We all laughed a lot about it, then we laughed more about it, and then we started riffing on the idea throughout dinner. I think Ray was staying somewhere in town, close by, and we went up to his room, hung out on the balcony, and talked more about it. Had a good laugh.

The night ended, and then shortly thereafter, Ray came up to me and was like “Hey, remember that silly idea we had? I want to run with this.” Because Ray is my best friend and I trust him with my life, I was like, ‘yes, let’s do it.’ Once we get an idea to do something, we’re super proactive, and we move fast. We formed a company, and we went through all the formal stuff. We set up Sassy Chap Games, and then we started on the very literal garage-type meetings, the genesis of creating the vertical slice for Date Everything.

We worked hard together with a very small team, all of whom ended up in the game in some capacity. We created a vertical slice, and we pitched it in a very traditional way through GDC, through contacts that we had. We got a couple of offers here and there, but nothing seemed quite right. Then COVID happened, so nobody was really taking pitches.

We then stepped aside and decided to retool the vertical slice, and then Amanda came into our lives. We had met Amanda previously via our pitching process and through some friends that we had had. They were recommended to us by someone who had worked in the industry, and they said, “Hey, Amanda is great at putting people in front of publishers.” We said “Who is this person? We would love to meet them.” Then, Amanda did the smartest thing you can do in business: they said “I will work for you to generate this opportunity for free, if you find a position for me in this company moving forward, should you be able to sell this game.”

That’s what we did. Amanda generated a ton of opportunities for us to pitch, and that’s how we landed with Team17. Six months of lawyering later, we began work, in earnest, around late 2022. That is the beginning of the production of Sassy Chap and Date Everything.

Q: When you guys revealed this game at GalaxyCon in North Carolina, the energy in the room was just electric. It was immediate. What was that moment like, and what have fan reactions been like since then?

Chase: Man, we were so nervous. It was so weird to say these names in front of people for the first time and get reactions in real time. It was wild.

Daymond: Fan reaction has been really positive, like overwhelmingly positive.

Hufford: When I posted the trailer, I kind of made a funny joke about it, and because it’s the internet, it really exploded. It generated so much fan reaction. The game hasn’t even been released yet, but we’ve had a decent amount of fan art. I was telling Ray the other day: at cons, I get people coming up to me to talk about the game even though it’s not even out yet. I wasn’t expecting that. It’s been heartening in truly the best way.

Creating A Cast Of 100 Dateable Objects

Q: One of the things that makes Date Everything so unique is that there are 100 dateable characters. Was 100 always the planned number, or did it increase or decrease it all in the process?

Chase: That was always one of the things where it had to be ridiculous in order for it to work. 100 is such a memorable number, it’s such a challenge, and somehow we were able to pull it off. There was a meeting that we had very early on, and we were like, who can you date? Look around the house. See all the things. In your average house, there’s like 500 objects that you’d normally be able to see at any given time. Paring that down was the hardest thing. Not coming up with the characters, but being able to say “How can we group certain objects together into one object?” Like all art being represented by a single “Art” character, clever things like that.

Daymond: That was the genius of combining things. We were like, “Oh, but wait a minute. Look around. We could make this all lump into one thing.” It would be a barren space if we didn’t do that.

Chase: There are certain things that are challenges in making a game like this, where you can literally date everything you see. If that’s the promise that we’re making to the player, then we need to make every single object. A lot of games can get away with making a 3D space, and maybe you can bump into something, or there’s set decoration. We can’t. Our “set decoration” is characters in the city that you live in, and that is also your own home. It’s challenging.

Daymond: We got through it somehow. Another great decision we had to make early on was, are all things one character? Are all lamps the same lamp with the same set of memories? Like, can you access this humanized version through multiple different things? And what we landed on was yes. We can give funny little nods to the differentiation between them. Ray’s favorite and least favorite is Dorian the Door.

Q: That’s the character Ben Starr voices, right? Oh, I love him already.

Daymond: He’s great. He has 17 different manifestations or something like that.

Chase: Yeah. 17 different doors. For some of them, he’s using a completely different voice, completely different art. It’s quite something, and we were able to play with that. The Window, she’s all windows, but depending on which way that you’re facing out the window, you can have a completely different playthrough: North, South, East, or West. There’s ways we can play with a lot of these characters, which helps too.

Daymond: Yeah, we also have Curt and Rod, two friends that are paired together that you can date. Their stories are connected, but you can choose if you date one or the other, or none, or both. But the interactions that you have with them are also dependent on what they can see in the outside world. If you go address them in the backyard, they’re going to have their scene about something that’s going on in the backyard, as opposed to the front, as opposed to the side, wherever they’re looking. It’s not true for every character, but it is a fun thing to mess around with.

Curt and Rod are a curtain and a rod.

To your point, it was always 100. We dug our heels in the sand really hard on that. I said we had some earlier offers that we didn’t like, and a lot of them were asking us to compromise. They were like ‘hey, it’s too much. Could you do 25? Could you do 50?’ And I’m like “I don’t know.” Even with the publisher that we’re at, they were like, ‘you could consider scaling back.’ Now, granted, the game has been twice delayed, so maybe there was some wisdom in some of those.

Q: I bet your fans are willing to wait.

Daymond: We announced the delay this morning and the feedback via all platforms was just overwhelmingly positive. I think they understand that we’re a small, first-time developer trying to do something incredibly ambitious. Ray has touted our numbers many times, but, in addition to 100 characters, we’ve got 1.6 million words and several thousand choices.

Chase: It was going to be part of the press release announcing the delay, but we deleted it. Here’s the part we deleted. “We’ve been coy on revealing too much as we’ve gotten through this winter, but please look forward to many more character and VA reveals over the coming months, along with sneak peaks of play-throughs.” Going forward, we’re definitely going to announce more of our cast. We’ve been keeping some secret who are some pretty banger names. People might go “I can’t believe this person agreed to a dating sim.” We’re really proud of them.

Here’s some data about the game: 1,602,572 words; 74,053 voiced lines; 27,924 choices; 13,090 images; a five hour and six minute soundtrack; and 79 hours of recorded voiceover audio. It’s a huge, ridiculous game.

Date Everything Has The Most Stacked Cast Ever

Q: With so many characters, how did the three of you pick which characters you were going to voice yourselves?

Chase: Scandalabra has always been my guy. He’s like one of the first dateable objects that we came up with at the beginning. He came fully formed. I know what he wants to be, someone who’s angry at you for dating everything, in opposition to you. He was someone I’ve wanted to voice for a long time, but I voice a couple others who haven’t been revealed.

Daymond: I’m the Hanks. I don’t even think it was my idea to play the Hanks. It was somebody else’s. Was it you, Amanda?

The Hanks are a group of hangers.

Hufford: Yeah. It’s perfect.

Daymond: I was always loath to claim characters, just because I wanted to cast everyone, but once the Hanks came in, I was like, “Oh, yeah, I want to do this.” I ended up playing another character instead, but then we had a last minute dropout. We’re a small company, somebody was due in that morning, and they canceled on us in the morning. I said, “I’ll do it.” It was super fun, and I’m happy with the way it turned out. I think we’re all happy with where we landed. We shuffled everybody around here and there.

Chase: Amanda’s our producer here, so they were around every step of the way. They knew all the characters and wrote a whole bunch of them too. And the problem with Amanda, which I think sometimes voice actors come up against, is that their range is too good. Amanda auditioned for like 15 characters and was perfect for all of them, but we couldn’t have them be all 15. So Amanda got shuffled around a lot as we pieced together our casting stuff.

I don’t want to speak for you Amanda, but I think you owned Rebel in such an incredible way. I think it’s a really good character for you: showing range, showing this funny, spikier side and then a softer, sensitive side.

Hufford: I’m very happy with Rebel. It was a lot of fun. I think, honestly, getting to throw something out at a lot of those characters when we were shuffling people around was the most fun part. I was like, “Okay, I did that one. Next!” And then we got to Rebel, who’s definitely where we needed to end up.

Q: Were any characters designed to be played by specific actors, or did all the casting choices come later in the process?

Chase: Every character had their own journey because we had so many options to go through. Some of them, when the characters basically wrote themselves, came fully formed. Some of them, as we were coming up with them, we were like, “Oh, we’ve got to.” Like Dante.

Daymond: Dante Basco is a friend of mine, has been for over a decade. To me, he’s got a really sexy voice. I was like, “Man, I feel like it would be great in a dating sim.” We have this big beautiful fireplace in the middle, this hearth in the middle of our living room. I was like, “Ah, this is Dante.” Obviously, we have the not-so-subtle wink and nod to Avatar, of course. I feel like this is too perfect to not just ask him to come in and do it, and he knocked it out of the park. Dante Basco will be playing Dante the Fireplace. He’s a really fun character with a really unexpected sort of storyline. Because it’s such a big, beautiful piece in the environment, I think people can gravitate towards it. [Laughs] Much like the toilet!

Q: You have these characters who are paired together, or come in a set like Curt and Rod, and it leads to these great pairings, some of them really unexpected. Like Washford and Drysdale, the washer and dryer, how did you end up with David Sobolov and Neil Newbon working together as a pair?

Daymond: It was fate. [Laughs] It wasn’t the same actors as in the vertical slice. We ended up changing things around and finding a new home for those two actors.

Chase: No, David was in the slice, and we had a different Drysdale.

Daymond: They sound so good together. I just remember we were looking for a pairing for David. He just has this amazing, resonant voice, this subwoofer rattling kind of voice. When we were working on casting for that one, we knew we wanted Neil in the game. There were a million different places for him, but this just felt the most natural. When we paired their voices together, it was just “Oh shit.” That’s the missing sauce that we had needed.

Q: Amanda, were any of the characters you wrote for particularly fun or particularly challenging?

Hufford: Yeah, my brain child, Volt, the electricity character. I went through so many iterations, so much heartache trying to get that character right, but I think where we ended up was pretty good.

Chase: They’re fun. There’s a pair actually, where it’s two for the price of one. You get to see different aspects of the same object, but they’re two completely different characters.

Daymond: We had roughly 20+ writers on this, all getting to voice their individual voices, but Ray is the one overseeing them all and also dialing in to make sure these stories match the overarching narrative and the tone of the game. It’s a real challenge. For me, personally, I did not do as much writing on the game as I planned originally, but I still did a pretty fair amount. I think I wrote something like six or seven characters, then I had a weird two months where I was doing punch-ups with Ray, where we were revisiting early characters.

I think that was one of the most difficult things for me. I rewrote about—I want to say—11 characters that were early, early iterations. I was just like, “Oh no, this doesn’t match what we’ve done over the past 18 months!” That, for me, was really challenging because we love the characters, but we had to increase the scope to make them fit in with how cool all the others were.

We had a pre-existing build where the characters were tiered depending on size and difficulty, so we were like “Oh, this is a one-star character. It’s fun. It’ll be a ten-minute date.” Then, at some point, we pivoted, and we were just like, “No, they all have to be equal.”

Chase: We noticed it with the Smoke Alarm. We were getting feedback from the publisher like “This seems unfinished. It just ended so quickly.” We’re like, yeah, she’s a smaller character. It made us realize: why do we have smaller characters? They should all be the stars of their own show.

Hufford: And that was really tough with the way the writing had evolved through the course of production. It was really important for Ray to sit down, take a look, and make sure that the things that were finished early still matched the tone of what we developed. It was a lot of work there at the end for Ray.

Daymond: Ray did the lion’s share of it, but we brought in some amazingly talented people like Logan Burdick and Nick Thurston, who helped in the end. We had a core writing staff that were polishing and finishing up all of these characters, to get them over the finishing line from a writing standpoint.

Q: How did you guys balance working on this game while also doing voice work and other projects at the same time? It’s really impressive.

Daymond: [Laughs] To the detriment of our health and personal relationships.

Hufford: I was on stream for six hours last night, and then I got up to do this interview.

The Future Of Date Everything

Q: Earlier today, it was announced that Date Everything’s release date was delayed from February to June. If you’re OK talking about it, can you talk about some of the motivation behind that decision?

Chase: For this one, it’s a game of assets and interesting things within all these characters. Everybody has something unique about them, which is absolutely a strength of the game when you play it. However, to make something like that means you have to test out every single thing within each of these 100 characters and how they interplay with each other.

The development is done. We’ve made all the assets and stuff. That was the first delay. We were like, “Okay, we actually have to finish making some of these things because we found some missing assets and some things that still need to be made.” That’s all done. All the programming is done, and now it’s just working on these last few bugs. We had a last-ditch effort where I flew to Portugal to try to be in the same time zone and work alongside our lead programmer, working every day, trying our best. But there’s just so much game to cover.

We and Team17 made the decision to just do one last release date push, make sure that everything is buttoned down and players get the experience that we always envisioned they would. Playing through a game that offers no problems with progress, or achievements, or other issues, all that sort of stuff.

Q: Now, you mentioned in the press release that you can date the glitches you have been dealing with – is that true?

Chase: Yes, you can date the glitch. Their name is Daemon. One of my favorite characters because they are able to mess up everything in the game. They have like a super power that none of the other dateables have.

Oh, that’s not going to be good for me – I know I’ll be trying to get a happy ending with everyone. To romance them all.

Daymond: You can, absolutely, but what if I told you that not every love ending is happy? What if I told you that’s not always the way to pursue. It’s totally up to you, but what if there’s a character where the worst thing for them is to fall back in love? But I will say this: you can get a “love everything” ending. You can get friendship-only—a full platonic run—and you can play the game as “Hate Everything.”

Q: Following the delay, what do the next several months look like for your team and for Date Everything?

Daymond: Well, from a marketing standpoint, we’ll have more time to show more. We’ll certainly have another gameplay trailer for you. We’ll probably have a Day One release trailer, and then we’re planning on announcing somewhere between another 30 to 50 voice actors.

We want to keep some characters secret, especially ones that are difficult to unlock, but we’re just tired of sitting on the cast because they’re so amazing. I was writing out an answer to another interview, and I gave a noncommittal answer like “I think this is the most stacked video game cast ever.” But I’m going to say it. This IS the most stacked cast of any video game ever.

Chase: I guess it’s true. You’ve got all the stars together. Normally you don’t get that.

Daymond: Normally, in another game, you’re going to have a core cast of 10 to 15 for your main characters. That’s it. This game is stacked. It’s unhinged. You’re going to see main characters from every video game franchise from the last 15 years, and cartoons, and anime, and television, and streamers. It’s unbelievable. That’s something we’re going to keep less secret and start announcing more.

We’re going to have some more trailers for you. We’re going to have some events. We’re going to have news about pre-orders and pre-release content. We’re going to have news about different editions that involve extra content. Then, hopefully to cap it all off, we’re just going to have a monster cast party where we send out some pictures and get the world hyped about what’s going to happen.

Q: There’s been literal betting pools about which actors will be in the game, so I imagine we’ll see more of those. The big one was for Matthew Mercer, whether you’d get him or not.

Daymond: We did get Matthew Mercer! His name’s Chance. He’s a twenty-sided die, of course.

Q: Anything else you’d like to share with Game Rant’s readers about Date Everything?

Hufford: I’m excited for all the people who are excited. I think the game has a lot on the surface. It’s funny, it’s tongue-in-cheek, but I think people are going to be pleasantly surprised at how much depth there is in these silly, wacky, sexy characters. There’s a lot of heart in this writing. Like Robbie said earlier, we had a massive writing team. All three of us wrote characters, and everybody really put a piece of themselves into these characters. There’s so much more to uncover about them, on top of the jokes.

I can’t wait for people to see that heart, that side of the game. I’m excited for the people who get to come out and say, “I really connected with this character. I thought it was just going to be funny, but that happened to me in my life, and it meant so much to me, to be seen that way.” Those are the things that really mean a lot to me.

Chase: For me, I want to kick it back to our publisher, Team17, who has taken such a big swing with us. We are voice actors who have never made a game before. We’re making a game in a genre that’s not known to a lot of traditional publishers. A lot of traditional publishers don’t usually work in that sort of field. We’re taking on that genre with a very unusual bent, a hugely asset-heavy, hugely voice actor-heavy bent. Things that most publishers go “No way, we’re not going to do that. We’re going to get rid of all this sort of stuff. We’re going to replace it with AI.” All of those usual evil things that publishers can do.

Team17, every step of the way, has been patient with us and allowed us to see this vision all the way through. At the end of the day, you guys are going to get this toy box of a game that continues to give you new stuff to uncover, which is really incredible. I have to hand it to them for taking such a big risk. I think, on their side, as the game is coming together, they’re seeing how well it is being received, how fun it is to play. I think they’re very, very excited, and can give themselves a pat on the back for following through with this one. Because that was one crazy risk, when you look back on it.

Daymond: All I want to say is that this is our first game, and people have stepped up in leadership ways and in creative ways to make this a true collaborative experience. I know that we’re delayed, but it’s for all the right reasons, and I think what comes out into the world is going to prove that we’re beyond excited and confident about this game. We’re ready for the world to see it. We just need a few more months.

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