Gears for Breakfast began not as a company but as a Kickstarter pitch from a Danish developer named Jonas Kaerlev, who in May 2013 asked the internet to fund a 3D collect-a-thon platformer in the spirit of the Nintendo 64 era that had largely vanished from the market. The campaign sought 30,000 dollars and closed a month later having raised 296,360 dollars from 9,169 backers, a result that turned a small personal project into an obligation with an audience attached. Kaerlev assembled a team from the game's own community and from artists and programmers he found online, built the game in Unreal Engine 3, and drew in guest talent that included composer Grant Kirkhope, whose work on Banjo-Kazooie had defined the very genre the project was reviving. The studio was formally founded in 2015, based in Denmark, and it has stayed deliberately distributed ever since, with a core team working from Denmark, Belgium, the United Kingdom, the United States, Argentina and the Netherlands rather than from a single office.
A Hat in Time arrived on PC on 5 October 2017 after more than four years in development, and it succeeded at the difficult thing it set out to do - not imitating the collectathon platformers of the late nineties, but understanding why they worked and rebuilding that feeling with modern controls and a sharper sense of humour. Console versions followed on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in 2018 and on Nintendo Switch in 2019, and the studio kept expanding the game long after launch with the Seal the Deal chapter in 2018, Nyakuza Metro and its Online Party mode in 2019, and Vanessa's Curse in 2022. Steam Workshop support turned the game into a modding platform in its own right, with community-made chapters and costumes that have kept the player base alive for years past the point where a game of its size would normally go quiet. Gears for Breakfast remains an independent studio in Denmark, now working with Balor Games on the long-term stewardship of A Hat in Time while it develops an unannounced new project.
