So I was supposed to be finishing up a post about RSS readers (yeah, still not over it, more on that some other day) and instead I spent basically all of Wednesday night refreshing a Kickstarter page like it was going to tell me something new every four minutes. Which, to be fair, it kind of was.
Double Fine, Tim Schafer's studio, put up a Kickstarter on February 8th asking for $400,000 to make a new point-and-click adventure game, no publisher, no platform holder, nobody telling them what the game has to be. They hit that goal in something like eight hours. Eight hours. I remember when Kickstarter was mostly people trying to press a vinyl record or fund a weird art installation in Brooklyn, and now it's funding an entire studio's next project overnight. By the time I checked again the next morning the number had basically doubled and it hasn't really slowed down since.
I backed it. $15, just enough to get the game when it's done plus whatever documentary thing they're filming about the process. Honestly I'd have backed it for the nostalgia alone. I grew up on Grim Fandango and the Monkey Island games, the ones where you'd get stuck on a puzzle for two days because you hadn't thought to combine the rubber chicken with the pulley in the middle of nowhere. Nobody makes those anymore, not really, because publishers decided a few years back that adventure games don't sell enough copies to justify the budget. So the genre just kind of quietly went away, except it turns out a whole lot of people my age never stopped wanting it back, we just had no way to say so with our wallets until now.
That's the part that actually gets me about this whole thing, more than the dollar figure. It's not that crowdfunding is some miracle cure for the games industry (it isn't, and I'd bet money the novelty wears off once every studio with a slow month tries the same trick), its that for one specific project it skipped the entire pitch meeting where some exec asks "but who is this FOR" and just let the answer be, apparently, tens of thousands of people with fifteen bucks and a soft spot for bad puns. I don't love the idea of every game getting funded this way going forward. Half the appeal here is that it's Tim Schafer and Double Fine specifically, people with an actual track record, not just anybody with a webcam and a pitch. I think that matters more than the platform does.
Anyway I also want to mention, completely unrelated, that I finally caved and I'm using Path again after ditching it back in November over the whole contacts-uploading mess. Their new version is nicer than I expected and I keep forgetting why I was mad in the first place, which is probably not a great sign about my memory or my standards, one of the two. My wife thinks its a dumb app. She might be right.
There's also some noise this week about a leaked build of Windows Phone 8, apparently codenamed Apollo, showing up in screenshots that are almost certainly real. I don't have a ton to say about it because I don't own a Windows Phone and probably won't, but it's funny watching Microsoft's next OS generation leak out in dribs and drabs months before Mobile World Congress even happens later this month. Everybody's phone roadmap is an open secret before the company even wants to talk about it these days. Apple's the only one that still manages to keep a lid on things and even that's mostly rumor blogs guessing correctly by volume.
Back to Double Fine for a second because I keep checking the pledge count between paragraphs of this post, which probably tells you something about how the rest of my evening is going to go. The stretch goals keep unlocking as the total climbs, more platforms, a strategy guide, stuff like that, and there's a genuine, kind of goofy energy in the comments section that I haven't seen around a game announcement in a long time. Not hype in the usual "OMG can't wait" sense, more like people are relieved. Like they'd been waiting for someone to ask if they still wanted this stuff.
I'll probably write something longer once the campaign wraps and we find out what the final number actually landed on. For now I'm just enjoying watching a decade-old genre get an unexpected second wind funded entirely by strangers on the internet who remember what a SCUMM interface looked like.