June 26th!!! Mark your calendars! Tell your friends! We have official word from Nintendo and Steam that Shovel Knight will be released and playable on the 26th of this month! Get ready for the greatest 8-Bit inspired adventure game to sweep you off your feet and deliver pure fun directly into your soul. We’ve worked 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for more than a year to bring this game to you; we’re extremely proud of the result, and we hope you love it just as much as we do. We hit some snags along the way and we’re sorry that we couldn’t deliver it sooner, but, hopefully, it will prove more than worth the wait! For all of you backers who have been following the adventure since the beginning, we have a few more surprises today too!

As an important note, this release date of June 26th for Shovel Knight 1.0 is for the American region on Nintendo’s eShop for Wii U and 3DS. This includes USA, Canada, and Mexico. We’ve been working through localization and ratings specific to the European region. Hard working developers and publishers who have come before us have helped improve this process and so we have been receiving great support. We hope that we will have good news to share soon. The Steam version will be an international release.

Box Art!

Check out the super rad box art for Shovel Knight! Imagine this box sitting on your shelf, behind the desk of a rental store, or waiting to be rescued under a stack of games at a garage sale!

Those of you who backed for $50 or more will be receiving a real Shovel Knight box in the mail soon…no dates for this yet as we’re notorious for missing them and are without firsthand experience shipping out this volume of physical things!

Just know that we’re working as fast as we can to get those rewards out to everyone. In the mean time, enjoy it digitally, and get ready to see many, many variations on it based on whatever platform you ultimately decide on to play Shovel Knight!

Instruction Manual!

Now that the game is complete, we can instruct you on how to best play it with this handy manual! And may we say it looks gorgeous?! Just check out a couple of these juicy spreads:

We tried our best to have it match the character, tone, and fun of the game, while simultaneously staying true to what made NES manuals unique, informative, and enjoyable. For those of you who have never seen an NES instruction manual, we recommend browsing through the following collection:

http://www.digitpress.com/library/manuals/nes/

Super Mario Bros. 3 is a good starting point for seeing how much love went into the few pages that made them up. For those of you who pledged $15 or more or pre-ordered the Deluxe Edition, login to the Humble Store to download immediately! We hope it keeps your shoveling spirit satiated on the lead up to the game’s release (and for the distribution of the physical manuals, which will be entering production soon!). If you’re spoiler sensitive and want to approach the game completely fresh, then you might want to be careful reading the manual. Just so you know, it reveals the story’s intro, the subweapons you can discover, and some of the places and people you’ll visit and see. Nothing too mind bending, it’s what you’d expect from a manual, but if you’re overly sensitive, be careful! Also, be kind to others and do your best to keep the contents of the manual to yourself!

The steps for downloading the digital manual through the Humble Store will be much like the steps needed to obtain the full game once its released. Consider this practice for the big day! You can read more about Humble Store at our Humble Store FAQ.

If the manual seems blurry or has visual issues, then we recommend changing the zoom or downloading it to your desktop and viewing it in a dedicated PDF viewer such as Foxit Reader or SumatraPDF.

E3 2014!

With 3DS systems in hand the Yacht Club team be wandering the showfloor this year in search of soon-to-be Shovel Knight players. Wave us down if you see us, as you can likely find us near the Nintendo side of the show. We may be revealing a cool thing or two about our game there as the show goes on. Keep your eyes peeled to all the coverage! That about wraps it up for today. While we were waiting in silence, you all kept in contact! Keep letting us know what you think on Kickstarter, Twitter, Facebook, our website, handwritten letters, whatever works best for you! And keep checking in with us this month as we’ll be doing more reveals and all kinds of interesting things!