Tim Schafer Kickstarts with Great Results
Kickstarter is a site designed for innovators to solicit donations for products, and by way of promising perks to those who donate certain amounts, can effectively allow people to pre-order products (assuming goals are met) with certain donations. Legendary game designer Tim Schafer and his team at Double Fine were just in the news about possibly bringing Psychonauts 2 with funding by Minecraft developer Notch, but now Double Fine has teamed up with an old friend, fellow adventure game legend Ron Gilbert, and started a Kickstarter campaign to get financial help for making a classic PC point-and-click adventure. How well has it gone?
They asked for $400,000 with the deadline for mid-March, and in the first six hours since they started the campaign they've gotten... $300,000 - 75% of that total. I think they'll very likely reach their goal , and for good reason, as Tim Schafer and Ron Gilbert played key roles in making some of the best adventure games ever made (Monkey Island series, Maniac Mansion, Day of the Tentacle, and Grim Fandango, just to name a few). If any of these games were a part of your fond gaming memories, definitely check it out.
It's also important to point out that while Double Fine was responsible for the mildly disappointing (to some) Brutal Legend which was a big-budget, AAA-quality game, they've since backed off from that style and have been making new games and IPs over and over since. They've made Costume Quest, Happy Action Theater, Stacking, and Sesame Street Once Upon A Monster, and now they're trying to innovate and bring new ideas into the old-school adventure genre again. Kickstarter has not really been useful for full-scale game development, even for downloadable or smaller-budget games, but this might have an impact on all future independent game development.
Update: They've made their $400,000 goal within 10 hours of the Kickstarter project going live, and any additional money they take in will be used to increase the game's budget for more voice acting and production values.
Update 2: $1 million in 24 hours. At one point, Kickstarter actually went offline.
