Yesterday, Double Fine Productions launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund a new old-school adventure game. The goal was $400,000. In less than 24 hours, the campaign has pulled down $880,000, and the dollars just keep rolling in.
There are two important things going on here.
First, Double Fine is a company founded by Tim Schafer, one of the brilliant minds behind classic LucasArts adventure games like Grim Fandango and Day of the Tentacle. Joining him in the creation of this crowd-funded game will be Ron Gilbert, the man behind Maniac Mansion and the first two Secret of Monkey Island games. Whenever this game is released, expect it to be hilarious.
Second, despite media jerks like myself decrying the death of the adventure game genre over the past decade, it is very apparent that people still have affection for those point-and-click games. If nothing else, this should convince publishers like EA and Activision that there is a market for games that don’t focus exclusively on busty martial artists or hyper-macho gun-toting military folk.
If you want to get in on the action, visit the Kickstarter page sometime in the next month and throw down some cash. The rewards on offer are pretty solid, and a mere $15 donation will net you a copy of the final game.
I’m uncomfortable with this latest trend by video game designers. It almost seems that they are taking advantage of their target audience by doing this. With the names involved in this project I’m sure that they could have received funding from many other sources, but they decided to pan handle to the hard core fans.
I think in this case it will pay off in the long run for the fans. However I think in most cases kickstarter for video game creation is a shady deal.
Granted, this is sort of a massive scale version of the age-old pre-order scheme, but I prefer to think of it as a chance to give money directly to the artists and designers instead of a massive publishing conglomerate.
Then again, I might be prone to optimism since I love Mr. Schafer’s earlier games. This is really the first time a (relatively) big game has been funded this way, so we won’t really know how the whole thing pans out until it’s been released.
Didn’t the nouveau riche Minecraft guy just offer to fund a Psychonauts sequel? I guess this is Doublefine’s response to that.
Somehow I think they’d be more successful just remaking Maniac Mansion for iPhone and Android.
On Topic: Yay! Double Fine. I donated. Can’t wait to see how they involve the kickstarter supporters throughout the process of bringing this game to light.
Off Topic: PS Vita releases on the 22nd (15th for the 1st Edition buyers) and not a single article about it… WTF?