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It may terrify you to learn that the setting of Poppy Playtime, the hit YA indie horror game that follows an ex-employee of a twisted toy company, was inspired by a real pace. But don't worry - the real-life inspiration for Playtime Co., Ideal Toy Company, never created anything that would jump out of the shadows and squeeze you to death. Actually, they created one of the most innocent childhood staples of the past two centuries - the teddy bear.

The revelation of Playtime Co's origins comes from an interview that Poppy Playtime creators Zach and Seth Belanger did with Rebecca McKendry for the lastest issue of Fangoria magazine. 

"The idea for Poppy Playtime," says Zach, "Came from our desire to challenge ourselves to create something eerie and unpredictable. [...] As for Playtime Co., we drew inspiration from Ideal, which was the toy factory famous for creating the original teddy bear in the early 1900s... before it became defunct."

I know, I know, the phrase "defunct toy company" has a bit of a macabre connotation in the context of a video game about murderous playthings, but there was no blood-soaked conspiracy that led to Ideal's shuttering, just bad old fashioned capitalism (unless that's how you refer to capitalism, in which case, hard to argue). After a century of creating kids delights' like the teddy bear and selling iconic products like the Rubik's Cube and the Magic 8-Ball, Ideal's IPs were bought and sold to other, bigger toy companies like Hasbro and Mattel, with nary a cursed artifact in sight.

Unless, of course, you've ever tried to solve a Rubik's Cube without a tutorial. The Venn Diagram between those results and the results of reading the Necronomicon is basically a circle.

Poppy Playtime Chapters 1-4 are available now.

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